Principia College is one of about a dozen college and university campuses in the United States to have been designated a National Historic Landmark. That’s out of about 4,400 schools in the country.

This is what a college should look like, what a college should feel like. It’s the masterpiece of one of the 20th century’s top ten American architects. In the 1930s San Francisco-based architect Bernard Maybeck designed the campus to resemble an English village. Take a walk through the East or West Quad, and you’ll understand.

Have you ever made s’mores in a fireplace you can stand in? The freshmen in Rackham Court have been doing it for years in the vaulted living room of the 70-something-year-old residence hall.

In springtime watch the waves pick up on the Mississippi River (it’s a really big river) as a storm rolls in. In late summer and fall, there’s nothing like watching a soccer game under the lights and hearing your cheers and shouts echo back across the playing field. In the winter you can walk outside, look off to the horizon, and see two, ten, or twenty bald eagles.

Be active and run on any one of the campus roads and trails. Or sit back and chill in the “horseshoe” carved into the bluffs by the Chapel green.

A 45-minute drive gets you to everything a major metropolitan area can offer — professional sports (including the World Champion Cardinals) in downtown St. Louis, museums at Forest Park, concerts at the U City Loop or in the Central West End — as well as places to do internships and businesses to tour on class field trips.

Here’s what one recent visitor, an employer on campus for a job fair, said: “What struck me was the beautiful architecture. It really did. What a jewel! And I think there is a real family feeling at Principia, more so than you find at most universities. . . . I think I made the comment to someone, ‘Boy, there are no distractions.’ It is a wonderful place where you can really focus in a very supportive environment. You don’t have other things clamoring as much for your attention as if you were in a school in the heart of a big city.”

On June 24, 1954, a decision was made to establish a new U.S. Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Colorado. Not at Principia. But it was not an easy choice. And the years beforehand were a downright perilous period for Principia College.

Not everyone knows that Principia’s campus high on the Mississippi bluffs was not only in the top 29, or the top three, but was one of the top two choices for the Air Force’s wish to establish an academy comparable to the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, and the Military Academy at West Point, New York.

The chambers of commerce in St. Louis and Alton, Illinois, were extremely active in pressing for the acceptance of the St. Louis-area site, but Principians were not, particularly when it became clear that the College campus would be forfeited. Lots of high-ranking local and national officials visited the area. At one point, the U.S. Air Force Secretary even toured the campus and met with Principia officials and uttered this surprise while standing near the Chapel overlooking the Mississippi River: “This is beautiful. We can leave it, but the rest of these buildings must go.”

Principia’s chief financial officer G. Eldredge Hamlin immediately took charge of a massive effort to organize and mobilize all Christian Scientists in a letter-writing program to ask President Eisenhower not to destroy Principia College and to locate the academy elsewhere.

Then someone remembered a person and an event that many believed could be a significant key to the final outcome. There was a Principia connection. Charlotte Prichard was the mother of an alumna and was great friends with President Eisenhower’s wife Mamie.

In October 2003, while former Kansas congresswoman Martha Keys visited Principia College, she reported that congressional colleague William Natcher of Kentucky told her a story about a meeting he had with President Eisenhower in which Ike said Mamie never asked him for any special favors — with one exception.

In essence, Ike said, “The only thing Mamie ever asked me for was to put the Air Force Academy in Colorado.”

History has endorsed Colorado Springs as the perfect site for the Air Force Academy, and the Mississippi bluffs, 45 minutes from St. Louis, as the perfect site for the only college in the world exclusively for Christian Scientists.

Excerpts from an article published in the Principia Alumni Purpose magazine in spring 2004