The Virginia Baptist Seminary offered courses in Latin, Greek, and mathematics. One interesting feature of the school was its manual labor component. Each day, students worked for three hours at farm labor. President Ryland thought highly of this system as it was "improving the health, diminishing the expenses, and perhaps guarding the humility of the young preachers." In reality, the farming experiment proved to be unprofitable and was dropped from the school after a couple years. Over time, enrollment and faculty increased to a point where the education society began looking for a more suitable property than small "Spring Farm," where dorms consisted of log cabins while the schoolrooms and the chapel were in a barn.