Frances Slater Harnsberger was born in 1939, at Cherry Grove, the Harnsberger family farm in Port Republic, Virginia. In 1961, Harnsberger graduated from Longwood College with a Bachelor of Science degree in Secondary Education. During her time at Longwood, she was a member of the Cotillion Club, the Wesley Foundation, the Longwood Choir, and Student Education Association and served on the staff of The Rotunda student newspaper. Shortly after graduation, she married Donald Edward Swope, a banker, and later Presbyterian minister, from Brownsburg, Virginia. Frances Harnsberger Swope worked for many years as a teacher, retiring in 1995 from the Hampshire County, West Virginia Board of Education.
The materials in this collection were accumulated by Frances Harnsberger Swope while she was a student at Longwood College. In 2011 this collection was donated to Nancy Shelton of the Longwood University Office of Alumni Relations by Swope, through her classmate, Tilly Conley. It is unknown when this collection was transferred to the Greenwood Library Archives.
This collection, which dates from 1958 to 1961, consists of student records, memorabilia, and ephemera from Frances Slater Harnsberger's time at Longwood College.