Mount Senario College, Ladysmith, Wisconsin

There was a Wikipedia article about Mount Senario College, that was founded in 1930, but closed in 2002, at 1500 W College Ave, in Ladysmith, Wisconsin, a town of about 3400 people in the 2010 census.  Obviously, Ladysmith was a rural college town, the county seat of Rusk County in Wisconsin, about a 150 miles from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and 60 miles from Eau Claire, Wisconsin.  Known as the “Fighting Saints,” Mount Senario College (MSC) was a private non-profit college located in the Catholic Diocese of Superior.  The College began in 1930, when summer extension courses were conducted in Ladysmith for the Servants of Mary, the Servite Sisters, by Eau Claire State Teachers College, now the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire.  In 1952, courses were expanded to be a junior college affiliated with the College of St. Scholastica, in Duluth, Minnesota.  Ten years later (1962), the Servants of Mary established Mount Senario College as a four-year college.  Enrollment was open to the public and emphasis was placed on teacher training.  The college was named after Monte Senario, the medieval birthplace of the Servite Order, near Florence, Italy.  In 1963, it received approval for certification of elementary teachers by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.  However, Mount Senario College became a non-sectarian institution in 1972, when a plan for the reorganization of the school was adopted by the board of trustees and approved by the Servants of Mary.  The college was granted academic accreditation by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools in 1975.  The main campus consisted of two major buildings.  The largest consisted of the college administration, library, bookstore, cafeteria, lecture halls, several classrooms, a chemistry laboratory, a biology laboratory, and a physics laboratory.  Adjacent to the college building was the dormitory.  The fine arts campus was located a half mile east of the main campus, on the corner of Wisconsin Highway 27 and College Avenue, and consisted of one building, originally erected in 1959 for Our Lady of Sorrows High School, which eventually became Servite High.  When that facility closed in 1967, the building became the Fine Arts Center for Mount Senario College.  This building housed MSC’s music and art programs.  Mount Senario closed on August 31, 2002 as a result of financial troubles.  The city of Ladysmith offered some financial assistance, however, it was not enough to save “The Mount.”  For the 2006–07 school year, part of the former campus was operated as Concordia Preparatory School, a private Christian preparatory school.  That institution also faced financial problems and closed midseason. Silver Lake College of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, began offering courses at Mount Senario, renamed “Mount Senario Education Center,” beginning September, 2009, but it closed in 2020.  This was a small town with a small college that the Servite Sisters loved.  What is the smallest college town that you ever heard of?