The university in Berrien Springs that started in Battle Creek

The first college the Seventh-day Adventists ever started wasn’t in Berrien Springs at all. It opened in Battle Creek in 1874 as Battle Creek College, the church’s first try at higher education. In 1901 the school pulled up stakes and moved across the state to a bluff above the St. Joseph River, just outside Berrien Springs, and renamed itself Emmanuel Missionary College. The first classes met in the old county buildings in town — the former courthouse, jail, and sheriff’s house — while the new campus took shape on the hill.

The name everyone knows came later. In 1960 the college merged with the Adventist theological seminary, which had just relocated from Washington, D.C., and the combined institution took the name Andrews University. It honors John Nevins Andrews, a 19th-century Adventist theologian and the church’s first official missionary sent outside North America. He died in 1883, long before the school carried his name, but the choice fit a place built around training people to go out into the world.

Today the campus sprawls across some 2,400 acres of farm fields, woods, and brick halls, which makes it one of the largest college footprints in the state by sheer land. It’s the flagship school of the Adventist church in North America, drawing students from well over a hundred countries to a town of a few thousand people. The seminary on the hill is the denomination’s main one.

That mix is what gives the Berrien Springs area its particular flavor. A small fruit-belt town in southwest Michigan, ringed by orchards and vineyards, somehow also runs on the rhythms of an international university — a vegetarian dining culture, a Saturday-Sabbath quiet, students speaking a dozen languages in the campus apple orchards the school still keeps.