Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
The death of Dr. John Huffman Jr. on Sept. 23, 2025, brought to a close the remarkable story of three generations of a family’s leadership that left its indelible mark on Winona Lake.
The Huffman legacy story begins with British theologian G. Campbell Morgan, a frequent visitor to the Winona Bible Conference. Morgan founded the Winona Lake School of Theology in 1920 and it enrolled theology students until 1970, when it was moved to the Chicago area and changed its name.
G. Campbell Morgan was a well-known pastor of his day who had recently left Westminster Chapel in London, England, to spend time in the United States. He led the Winona school in 1920 and 1921, and was succeeded for the year 1922 by George W. Taft, president of Northern Baptist Seminary in Illinois. In 1923, William Biederwolf became head of the school.
Presidents of the Winona Lake School of Theology included Dr. William E. Biederwolf, Dr. G. Campbell Morgan, Dr. Jasper A. Huffman, and Jasper’s son, Dr. John A. Huffman.
Although Biederwolf held the title of president of the school until his death in 1939, in reality the school was shaped and organized by Jasper Huffman, who had been serving as the dean of Marion College (now Indiana Wesleyan University) in Marion, when Biederwolf persuaded him to become dean of the Winona school.
Jasper Abraham Huffman (1880-1970) was born in Elkhart. He became a scholar, publisher, educator, biblical archeologist and activist for higher education within his own church denomination. Jasper served as president of the Winona School of Theology from Biederwolf’s death in 1939 until 1954, when Huffman’s son, John Adam Huffman, succeeded him, serving as president from 1954 to 1970.
Jasper Huffman’s son, John, recalled the following: “Dr. G. Campbell Morgan came occasionally to Winona Lake as a Bible conference speaker and always was very popular with ministers. In 1920, when the great British preacher and scholar was there, the facilities of Bethany Girls Camp were opened to Dr. Morgan in a special program where ministers who were really interested in Bible study could come and take a serious Bible training course over a period of two and a half weeks.
“Dr. Morgan’s course was so popular they had two sessions a day. That auditorium was filled with ministers, some 600 meeting daily. In his inimitable way he put a big blackboard up and charted the outline of his lecture, and they were eager for it. Father was brought there as director of the summer school in 1928 and spent all of his summers from then on until many years later developing that and putting it on a real curriculum basis.”
The Winona School of Theology operated in the summers only, and each year, at the end of the summer, the faculty took the student body down to Cherry Creek and they all climbed Hamilton’s Mound for a consecration service before dispersing to their home ministries.
The Winona School of Theology also played a key role in the founding of Grace Theological Seminary in the 1930s. The school had begun under the direction of President Alva J. McClain for its first several years in a church in Akron, Ohio. But Biederwolf urged McClain to bring his school back to Winona, noting that the School of Theology had a theological library of some 6,000 volumes, used only in the summers, and, as an enticement for relocation, he indicated that Grace students could use the library during the school year.
The late John Huffman, Jr., in his autobiography titled “A Most Amazing Call,” recalled spending many of his boyhood summers at Winona. He also chronicled the decline and eventual relocation of the school, noting that toward the end his father worked a number of summers at the school without pay.
Huffman Jr. reported, “We lived in the summertime at Winona from 1920 on. I was 8 years old at that time. A multimillionaire from Cincinnati had a beautiful home in Winona called ‘Aloha Cottage’ which he turned over to our family for its use in the summertime. We didn’t own that home, but with the exception of a couple of years when father put me on the farm where he thought every boy ought to be for a couple of years to become a man, from the time I was 8 years old until 1970 I was at Winona every summer in one capacity or another.”
That “beautiful home” sat at the point of McDonald Island, immediately to the south of Solomon Dickey’s Killarney Castle. Three generations of Huffman families occupied the spacious home over the years. A more recent replacement home now occupies that spot.
