Christian Colleges in Early Georgia
Oglethorpe University, Midway (Milledgeville) Ga.
This is the site of the antebellum college established in the community of Midway by the Hopewell Presbytery in 1835. Old Oglethorpe College resulted from a movement by Georgia Presbyterians to establish in their state an institution for the training of their ministers. For generations their families had sent their sons to Princeton College in New Jersy for that trianing. In 1835 the state of Georgia chartered Oglethorpe University as a Presbyterian institution named after James Edward Oglethorpe, the founder of the colony. Near Milledgeville, Oglethorpe University was the first denominational college established in the Deep South. The antebellum college began with four faculty members and about twenty-five students, and was originally located on a hill at Midway, a small community in Baldwin County near Milledgeville, then the capital of Georgia. The original Oglethorpe curriculum consisted of courses in Greek, Latin, mathematics, theology, and the natural sciences. Notable faculty members included the college’s longtime president, Samuel Kennedy Talmage, an eminent minister; Nathaniel M. Crawford, professor of mathematics and son of Georgia statesman William Harris Crawford; Joseph LeConte, destined to earn distinction in geology and optics; and James Woodrow, an uncle of Woodrow Wilson and the first professor in Georgia to hold the Ph.D. degree. Oglethorpe’s most distinguished alumnus from the antebellum era was Georgia poet, critic, and musician Sidney Lanier, who graduated in 1860. Shortly before his death, Lanier remarked to a friend that his greatest intellectual impulse had been during his days at Oglethorpe College.
Mercer University, Penfield, Ga.
Mercer Institute, the forerunner of Mercer University was founded in 1833 in Penfield, Ga. by Georgia Baptists. Savannah jeweler Josiah Penfield gave $2,500 that prompted the Georgia Baptist Convention to begin plans to open a school. With the bequest from Josiah Penfield and a matching gift from the Georgia Baptist Convention, Mercer’s first trustees purchased 450 acres of farmland for the prospective school. Soon after, the board acquired an adjoining tract of fourteen and a half acres. Baptist minister Jesse Mercer, a long-term leader of the convention, was instrumental in the school’s founding, he provided a third of the amount needed to purchase the acreage. The school, under the leadership of Baptist minister and spiritual father Adiel Sherwood, was named for Jesse Mercer, the prominent Baptist leader and the first chair of the Mercer Board of Trustees. Many Georgia Baptists gave matching funds for Penfield’s gift. The school opened under principal Billington Sanders, who housed twenty-six of the thirty-nine original students in his home and his wife served as a surrogate mother to them. Initially a male preparatory school and manual labor school for boys, the school at its founding consisted of a red clay farm and two hewed log cabins, valued at approximately $1,935. When the school opened, tuition was $35 for the year. Board was provided at $8 per month, and each student was required to supply his own bedding, candles and furniture. As the first agency sponsored by the Ga. Convention, the institute was founded to educate young men for the ministry, although many were nonministerial students. The Georgia General Assembly granted them university charter in December 1837 and in 1838 Mercer’s first Board of Trustees is elected and Mercer Institute became known as Mercer University. It graduated its first university class, of three students, in 1841. In its early years Mercer University’s academic program was based on three divisions: classical, theology, and “preparatory.” Competence in Greek and Latin were required for entrance to the university. Manual labor, an essential feature of the institution from the beginning, was discontinued in 1844. The theology department disbanded in 1859 when the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary opened in Greenville, South Carolina, and recruited Mercer’s theology professor William Williams.
Mercer Chapel, later Penfield Baptist Church was constructed by David Demorest to serve as Mercer University’s Chapel in 1845-46.
Emory College, Oxford, Ga.
Emory College was chartered December 19, 1836 when Georgia Methodists expanded their educational program. Named in honor of Methodist Bishop John Emory (1789-1835) who helped organize several northern colleges and presided over the Georgia Conference in 1834, this Christian liberal arts college was the outgrowth of the Georgia Methodist Conference Manual Labor School located in 1834 near Covington. Ignatius A. Few, first president (1837-39) of Emory College and a founder of both the College and the town. Dr. Few, as President of the Manual Labor School near Covington, was one of those responsible for Oxford’s being the site of the expansion of the labor school into a liberal arts college. Early in 1837, 1,452 acres of land two miles from the labor school, were purchased. Three-hundred thirty acres were set aside for a Christian collegiate community and named Oxford in honor of the English university where Methodist founders John and Charles Wesley were educated. A Methodist minister and surveyor, Edward Lloyd Thomas, who had planned Columbus, Georgia, was chosen to plan Oxford. In April and May 1837, he completed his plans by which Oxford’s main streets converge on the site of the central building of the college campus. By act of the College Trustees, these streets were named for Methodist founders and leaders. One hundred and twenty-five lots were offered, originally for 999 years lease, but later for sale, with the provision “no intoxicating liquors shall be sold, nor any game of hazard allowed on the lots, under penalty of forfeiture.”
"Old Church" 1841 was the first Chapel of Emory College, and a church for Methodists in Oxford, a pulpit for scholar--preachers. It was the center of Methodism in the South.
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