Winona State is indebted to William F. Phelps for his efficient organization and for it's renewed success, after being closed for nearly two years due to the Civil War.
Phelps was said to have possessed a combination of energy, vision and experience. By the time the school was reopened on Nov. 1, 1864, Principal Phelps had divided the school year into two terms instead of three as at the beginning, a plan retained until 1880. In 1866, Phelps presided over the groundbreaking ceremony for the first State Building in Minnesota. "Old Main" was occupied in 1869 and the building plans, overseen by Phelps, became the model for similar Normal School building projects new York, Illinois and Kansas.
Beginning in 1870, Phelps led the expansion of the normal school's curriculum to a two-year program affording "a thorough mastery of elementary subjects in heir relations to each other." Again, the Winona model was adopted at Normal School's across the growing country.
In the summer of 1876, after a dozen years of service, Phelps resigned in order to accept the presidency at the new Normal School at Whitewater, Wis., and later returned to Winona as Superintendent of Schools.
