During her lifetime, Elizabeth Evans Baker made a number of significant contributions to Juniata College. She was fundamental in the development of both the Baker Peace Institute and the Peace Chapel. Elizabeth was born on February 25, 1902, in Montclair, NJ where she grew up until 1910 when her family moved to Essex Falls. She cultivated a love of culture early in her life, participating in horseback riding and other sports, learning language, singing, playing instruments, and otherwise expressing her artistic vision. She maintained most of these hobbies throughout her life. In 1920, she attended Smith College in Massachusetts to attain her bachelor’s in English and a minor in music. However, due to her father’s death, she did not complete her final year.
During the next phase of her life, she began a rigorous self-study of the areas she had begun work on at Smith. She became a professional singer for a short time in New York with several opera and stage companies in 1926. In 1929 she met her husband, John Calhoun Baker, who was a professor and assistant dean at Harvard business school. They married in 1933 and had three daughters, Elizabeth, Eleanor, and Anne. In 1945, the family moved to Athens, Ohio where John had taken a job as the president of Ohio University and where Elizabeth was highly involved on campus. As an outspoken woman and passionate peace advocate, Elizabeth was appointed as a UN Goodwill Ambassador by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and represented the United States delegation at the United Nations Economic and Social Council along with her husband in 1953, 1954 and 1956. In Geneva, Elizabeth oversaw the UN social activities.
Consistent with her peace activism, in 1969 Elizabeth proposed a peace studies program to Juniata College’s President, John Stauffer. She chose Juniata because her husband’s mother had graduated from Juniata in 1881 and he was raised in Everett Pa, less than fifty miles south of the college. In 1971, the proposal was accepted after a two year dialogue between Baker and Stauffer. Protests against the Vietnam War and racial unrest were rampant in the nation and had unsurprisingly spread through the college. Although the project was delayed because of these issues, it was never more appropriate that the idea should be proposed than during this time. Through this unrest, it became evident that “the peace-maker’s occupation was surely a career with a future.” To gain support, Elizabeth Baker called upon the heritage of the school as a Brethren college, which was historically a strongly pacifist church. Three years later, a full-fledged “Peace Studies” program was officially launched. Andrew Murray, former director of the program, commented on Elizabeth’s monumental contribution, saying, “It would be impossible to list everything that the Bakers have made possible for us. In short, there would be no Peace and Conflict Studies at Juniata had not Elizabeth Baker been persistent in her efforts in the late 1960s and early 1970s to convince Juniata of the importance of peace education and of its consistency with Juniata’s heritage and mission.”
On the date of its official launch, the program was funded only by the Bakers’ gifts totaling $27,000. In 1984, the Juniata Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies was established to house the peace and conflict studies program. It was renamed for the Bakers in 1986. “Elizabeth Baker, in particular, was absolutely instrumental in shaking the college. It is to her persistence that we owe our gratitude and so much more,” says Klaus Kipphan, who worked closely with the program from its initial stages.
Other colleges home to peace programs initiated by Elizabeth Baker include, Bethany Theological Seminary (IN), Ohio University (OH), and Dartmouth College (NH). Many colleges have directly contacted Juniata for consultation and advice on creating such a program at their own institution. Juniata also recognizes a peace and conflict studies student in Baker’s name with the Baker Peace Studies Prize. First awarded in 1977, the prize was funded initially by an endowment given by the Bakers in 1972.
Elizabeth also played a significant role in the establishment of the “Peace Chapel.” Elizabeth and her husband, then a trustee of the college, visited a piece of land that the college wished to buy. Elizabeth was immediately moved by the scene and the vision of a chapel on the site burned in her mind. When the land was purchased by the trustees as a nature preserve, the chapel was solely an idea in the mind of Elizabeth Baker. After the land purchase in 1975, the trustees renamed it Baker-Henry nature preserve. Mr. and Mrs. Jewitt Henry shared the financial heavy-lifting with the Bakers. Elizabeth originally envisioned a wooden or otherwise standing structure, however, Andrew Murray, a consultant for the project, said a physical building would be “costly to maintain and it seemed…too invasive.” There was some debate about what the nature of the site should be, but after about a year of discussion Elizabeth’s original opinion was swayed and it was decided that an inclusive, non-denominational sacred place of meditation would be best suited to the college’s mission. Her husband was hesitant about putting anything there at all, but he backed the project after the idea was proposed to employ a well-known architect. In 1988, Maya Lin accepted the commission to design and create the Peace Chapel. Lin proposed a forty diameter circular seating area of granite stone blocks to be a place for group contemplation. The hilltop site was to be complimented by a second area reserved for individual meditation comprised of a single circular slab on a hill adjacent to the group site. The Bakers approved of this design and this is how the peace chapel stands today.
Unfortunately, too ill to see the dedication of the chapel, Elizabeth Baker lost her fight to cancer on June 21, 1990. Elizabeth received an honorary degree from Juniata. She was deemed a Doctor of Humane Letters, on October 1989, the day of the Elizabeth Evans Baker Peace Chapel dedication.
Alison Shannon ‘16
Endnotes
- Marta Daniels, Peace is Everybody’s Business: Half a Century of Peace Education with Elizabeth
Evans Baker (Huntingdon: Juniata College, 1999), 11-2.
- Daniels, Peace is Everybody’s Business, 12-14.
- ibid., 16.
- ibid., 125.
- ibid. 24.
- ibid., 127.
- ibid., 126.
- ibid., 125.
- ibid. 130.
- ibid., 137.
- ibid. 156.
- ibid., 157–201.
- Earl C. Kaylor, Juniata College: Uncommon Vision, Uncommon Loyalty: The History of an Independent
College in Pennsylvania Founded by the Brethren 1876-2001 (Huntingdon, PA: Published by Juniata College, 2001), 291.
- Kaylor, Juniata College, 250.
- Andrew Murray, recorded video interview, CD-ROM.
- Daniels, Peace is Everybody’s Business, 08.
- ibid., 22.
- ibid., 21.
Citation for Interview: Murray, Andrew. Interview. Huntingdon, PA. Juniata College.