History
Adoniram Judson Gordon opened a Bible school called the Boston Missionary Training Institute in the basement of his Baptist church in 1889 to train Christian missionaries for work in the Belgian Congo. It was renamed Gordon Bible College in 1916 and moved out of its church and Newton Theological Institution facilities to The Fenway, into a facility given by Martha Frost, in 1919. In 1921, it was renamed to Gordon College of Theology and Missions. In the early 1950s, a Gordon student named James Higginbotham approached Frederick H. Prince about selling his 1,000-acre (4.0 km2) estate to the college, and in 1955, Gordon developed into a liberal arts college with a graduate seminary and moved to its present several-hundred-acre Wenham campus. Gordon sold its old facilities to the Wentworth Institute of Technology, the Prince Memorial Chapel on the new campus (since razed) was named for Frederick Prince, and Prince's mansion was renamed Frost Hall after Martha Frost. In 1962, the school changed its name again to Gordon College and Divinity School. In 1970, the Gordon Divinity School separated from the college and merged with the Conwell School of Theology in Philadelphia, once part of Temple University to form the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts. In 1985, Barrington College of Rhode Island went bankrupt and merged into Gordon College. Gordon College is the only nondenominational Christian college in New England.
Barrington College was founded in 1900 as the Bethel Bible Training School in Spencer, Massachusetts, and was later located in Dudley, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island. It took the name Barrington after the campus was moved to that Rhode Island community in 1959. Gordon and Barrington were merged as the united college on the Wenham campus in 1985. In 1996 Gordon College began a graduate program in education and in 2003 added a graduate program in music education.
Read more about this topic: Gordon College (Massachusetts)
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