Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
SECONDARY SCHOOL AND COLLEGE-THE COLLEGE AND THE DEVELOPING, MODERN EDUCATION SYSTEM - The region and the Church District - En Route to Differentiation
SECONDARY SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 132 The dining hall was built with the donation of András Mudrány, a nobleman in Szabolcs county the wine industry was compensated by the region’s prominent role in public life during the first part of the century. This was due to the presence of the College, but only partially. Kazinczy with his activities in Széphalom and some radical-liberal members of parliament with their different claims also played a significant role. As the era passed, its passing led to the devaluation of the immediate environment of the College. Wine production and management in the region reached new lows. The income from wines was insufficient for the previously prosperous small towns to maintain their position throughout the area and it was also insufficient to ensure economic prosperity in the region itself. Grapes and wine proved to be difficult to replace. The ratio of large estates was much higher in the Zemplén (fifty percent) than the national average (thirty-one percent) and there were settlements whose lands consisted of nothing but vineyards (more than thirty percent). An economic structural change seemed next to impossible. Economic development, therefore, was much slower in large parts of the county than the national average. Therefore, the inhabitants here were not beneficiaries of the intensive growth of the dualistic period playing out elsewhere. The situation reached a crisis point in the 1880s. Phylloxera destroyed all the vines in the region. While nationwide forty-four percent of the vineyards were lost, in the counties of Abaúj, ninety-five percent, in Borsod, ninety percent and in Zemplén, eighty-one percent of the vines were destroyed. With the quality wine industry completely obliterated, all the old market towns of Zemplén were forced to abandon their rank and rights as cities and declined to be nothing more than large villages. Sátoraljaújhely suffered a similar fate, but despite losing city rights and city status, it was able, by itself, to reorganize and increase productivity. The town’s population doubled between 1869 and 1910 and reached twenty thousand. Only a few years after the Compromise (1867), five banks, a stock market for farm crops and several political associations were organized. The Piarists were once again able to finance their secondary school and within a few more years a casino, a women’s reading club, a gym and several cafes opened and served the emerging middle class lifestyle. Újhely shortly became the new county centre thanks to the new functions. From the turn of the century onwards, an increasing number of civil servants were assigned to jobs in the county. In 1902, the town regained its city rank and rights, streetlights were installed and the newly built railway station had an enviable turnover rate of passengers. Due to the lack of veritably high-level investors and important economic players and despite the rapid changes, the majority of the population lived in inferior quality housing. The number of shabby buildings increased by the day and the rapid increase in population was not accompanied by pre-planned land and housing development. Thus, according to a contemporary observer, Újhely was nothing more than “a special proletarian settlement which you won’t find anywhere else”. 1879 was a terrible year for the crops and it resulted in famine and misery throughout the entire city. In the so-called American Exodus, Zemplén suffered a loss of thirty thousand people, the largest number among the counties in Hungary, thus, for a while, population growth was seriously disrupted. Only the newly-built tobacco factory stemmed the tide of even more dramatic losses of population.
