RVCC: A Little Mystery in Our History
The good news for students desperate for a parking spot this fall is that there won’t be anyone parked in Lot No. 3. The bad news is that it seems like Lot No. 3 doesn’t actually exist.
This is just one of the oddities that can be found by exploring the grounds and history of Raritan Valley Community College.
November is a particularly auspicious month for RVCC. Forty-one years ago this month, the Somerset County Freeholders officially founded the college, although it would be almost two years before a faculty would be hired and a place to build the actual school would be found.
Finding the site would turn out to be an adventure in itself. Everyone thought a two-year college would be a great asset for Somerset County, but no residents wanted it built in their backyard.
In 1967, the committee prepared to use eminent domain to seize a section of Duke Estates in Hillsborough, home of millionaire Doris Duke. According to former senator and longtime college trustee Ray Bateman, Duke had other ideas. “She told me, ‘You put it somewhere else, and I’ll pay for it,’ ” he said.
Eventually, the Wilson farm in North Branch — right across the street from Bateman’s own property — was mentioned as a possible site, and Duke was supportive of the new location and gave the college board enough money to buy the land and have some left over. Bateman said that not only would taking part of Duke Estates have been unfair, but the current location has actually been better for the school. “You know,” he said, “she was right.”
Duke’s quiet contribution to the birth of Somerset County College was typical of her very private philanthropy. According to Bateman, she tended to keep her involvement in local affairs private, but she was always supportive of Somerset County.
“She gave a lot to the local area, but she never wanted to talk about it,” he said. In spite of the awkward beginning of the college’s relationship with Duke, Bateman said that he enjoyed dealing with her over the years, “I found her right to the point, easy to deal with, and she always did what she said she would do.”
The Wilsons chose to sell all but the last dozen acres of their farm to the college, and they continued to live on those acres quietly for several more years. In 1980, the Wilsons sold the college the last of their land, along with the nearly 200-year-old farmhouse. For a time this farmhouse was the home of the college president, but in recent years it has become the seminar center.
But the physical size of the campus wasn’t the only thing to expand. Hunterdon students had begun enrolling at Somerset County College, because there was no community college in their own county. So, twenty years ago this month, on Nov. 19, 1986, Hunterdon County joined with Somerset County to make Somerset County College the first bi-county college in New Jersey.
Bateman said that joining the two counties was a logical step. “We decided that if we were going to serve Hunterdon and Somerset, we shouldn’t just be a Somerset college,” he said.
It was easy to sell Hunterdon officials on the idea, said Bateman. There was a demand for a two-year school in that part of the state, but founding a new college would have been expensive. Partnering with the already-existing college saved Hunterdon a huge amount of money and was a benefit to everyone.
The location of the college was vital to the decision. “I think that if the college had been in the middle of Somerset, it wouldn’t have worked,” said Bateman. “As it is, it’s only about a thousand yards from the [Hunterdon] border.”
To commemorate the union, the college’s name was officially changed to Raritan Valley Community College the following spring. Professor Brock Haussamen recalls thinking at the time that “four words instead of three was probably going to get abbreviated various ways in the future”— such common sobriquets as “RVCC,” “RV,” “Raritan Valley,” “Raritan Val” and “Raritan Valley College.”
RVCC is a fairly young institution, and so it hasn’t had time to gather many urban legends, but it still has a mystery or two. Parking Lot No. 3 isn’t the only thing to get “lost.”
“For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the college, they buried a time capsule somewhere,” said Robert Egan of the college library. “The problem is nobody remembers where it’s buried.”
Egan said “there’s a rumor that they buried it under the flagpole.” Which would have been a helpful tip for posterity if, as part of the construction of the current visitors parking lot, the school hadn’t moved the flagpole.
If our great grandchildren, many years from now, want to know what it was like to go to college at the turn of the century, we can tell them that they can find a container of sports memorabilia, artwork and academic papers from the 1990s right here in North Branch. When they ask us where they can dig up this wonderful treasure trove, we’ll really only have one answer: “Look in Lot Three.”