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- Founding - Old
Sem - Name - Women
- First Graduates -
- King Chapel - Physical
Education - May Music Festivals
- OCAAT -
A traveling Methodist preacher named George Bryant
Bowman rode his horse to the top of a hill one day in 1851 and was
smitten with what he saw below: prairie and forest stretched amphitheater-like
for 15 miles in all directions, with the hamlet of Pinhook (later
renamed Mount Vernon) nestled at its base. Legend has it Bowman
had a prophetic vision of future buildings, inspirational teachers
and a flood of students. He dismounted, knelt and dedicated the
site to the cause of Christian education.
The fact that Bowman was raising a college in the
middle of the frontier, where pioneers were poor and materials hard
to come by, didn't make a dent in the clergyman's enthusiasm. Bowman,
a dynamic and gregarious man, gathered townspeople, pitched the
idea and raised $100 for a college that was called, at first, The
Iowa Conference Seminary. In one of his more colorful fund-raising
ventures, he talked a potter friend into donating crocks and floated
a boatload of them up the Mississippi to Galena, Ill., where he
sold them for a few hundred dollars for the school.
The college's first building, the Seminary Building,
was finished in November 1853. The 167 students who had been temporarily
learning in the town's old brick church celebrated with a procession
to the Seminary Building.
In 1855 the college's Board of Trustees went shopping
for a name, eventually settling on Cornell College after William
Wesley Cornell, a prosperous New York iron merchant, a Methodist
and a distant cousin to Ezra Cornell, who would found Cornell University
10 years later.
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