History
The college traces its origins to a request to the American Baptist Home Mission Society by Professor Almon C. Bacone, a missionary teacher, to start a school in the Cherokee Baptist Mission at Tahlequah, Indian Territory. Bacone had previously taught at the Cherokee Male Seminary.
When he started Bacone College, Professor Bacone, the sole faculty, enrolled three students. By the end of the first semester, there were 12. By the end of the first year, the student population was fifty-six and the faculty numbered three.
Seeing the need to expand, he appealed to the Muscogee Creek Nation's Tribal Council for 160 acres (0.65 km2) of land in nearby Muskogee, Oklahoma, known then as the "Indian Capital of the World." The land was granted, and in 1885 Indian University was moved to its present site. In 1910, it was renamed Bacone Indian University after its founder and first president. The Board of Trustees later changed the name to its current Bacone College, as it emphasizes undergraduate education.
The campus contains many reminders of Bacone's history, tradition, and goals. One of these is a small cemetery, the final resting place of Bacone Presidents Almon C. Bacone (1880–1896) and Benjamin D. Weeks (1918–1941), as well as others associated with the school over the years. Another reminder on the west side of the campus proper is a stone pulpit that marks the spot on which President Bacone and two Baptist missionaries who were also trustees of Indian University, Joseph Samuel Murrow and Daniel Rogers, knelt in prayer to dedicate to the Christian education of American Indians the 160 acres of land received from the Creek Indians.
Read more about this topic: Bacone College
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“I am not a literary man.... I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.”
—J.A.H. (James Augustus Henry)
“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)