History
Oglethorpe University was chartered in 1835 in Midway, just south of the city of Milledgeville, then the state capital. The school was built and, at that time, governed by the Presbyterian Church, making it one of the South's earliest denominational institutions. The American Civil War led to the school's closing from 1862 to 1866.
The college followed the relocation of the capital to Atlanta. In 1870, it began holding classes at the present site of Atlanta City Hall. Plagued by financial difficulties, the school closed its doors two years later.
Oglethorpe College was re-chartered as a non-denominational institution in 1913. In 1915 the cornerstone to the new campus was laid at its present location on Peachtree Road in Brookhaven. The person behind rebuilding Oglethorpe was Dr. Thornwell Jacobs, whose grandfather, Professor Ferdinand Jacobs, had served on the faculty of Old Oglethorpe. Jacobs would serve as president for nearly three decades.
In the early 1940s Oglethorpe University had a medical school. Under the direction of Dr. John Bernard, the university was given several elephants for research, who had been poisoned by the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus. After the students had finished dissecting the animals they were buried under what is known today as the Philip Weltner Library.
Oglethorpe University became Oglethorpe College in 1965, and reclaimed the designation "university" several years later. Many of Oglethorpe's campus buildings were built in a Gothic revival architecture style. This area of the 100-acre (0.40 km2) campus is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Read more about this topic: Oglethorpe University
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)