Dickinson College - Microcosm Yearbook (Carlisle, PA)

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Denny Hull 1896 45133, sg .'f.lm.m...,1 ,M sm, 'eds' ' llllll BUILDINGS WRITE UUB

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S One hundred and seventy-six years ago, on March 3, 1773, Thomas and John Penn, Proprietors of Pennsylvania, deeded to a group of nine trustees a. plot of ground in Carlisle for the purpose of keeping and maintaining a grammar school' The school was open in the same year under the principalship of Mr. james Ross, a distinguished author of Latin and Greek grammars. Mr. Ross is remembered today as one of the outstanding educators of our colonial period, and is revered as the nrst member of the faculty of Dickinson College. The grammar school, begun in 1773, continued operation until it was absorbed by the College in 1783. Meanwhile, on Bingham's Porch in Philadelphia, two men met in 1782 to formulate plans for a college to be located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. These two friends were John Montgomery, a Carlislean, and Benjamin Rush, a prominent Philadelphia physician. Theirs was a difficult job. They had to contend not only with the national economic and social turmoil which always follows a war, but also with the active prejudice against the founding of another college in the area. There were already two colleges nearby-one at Princeton, and one at Philadelphia. The influential leaders of that day who supported either of the two would naturally oppose the founding of a third in the same general vicinity. It was only through Rush's zeal and persistence that the plan for Dickin- son College ever was realized. IT WHS 1 be

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Envisioning the proposed institution as a center of the spread of Christian teachings and higher education to the expanding West, Rush transformed opponents to the trustees and skeptics to believers. Therefore, on September 9, 1783, three days after the signing of the peace treaty ending the American Revolution, there was enacted in the General As- sembly of Pennsylvania a charter for Dickinson College. The first difhculty had been surmounted. but the real struggle had scarcely begun. The ensuing years were filled with the petitioning for endowments, searching for administrative and faculty members, and innumerable obstacles which had to be overcome. Rush himself wrote, I have experienced degrees of anxiety I never felt before. Colleges like children, I find, are not borne without labor pains. But all will end well. Our brat will repay us hereafter for all the trouble it has given us. Misfortune followed in the footsteps of the new college. In 1803, five weeks after the completion of the first college building, a fire accidentally started which burned it to the ground. Rush again was the driving force behind the building of Old West. He wrote to his friend Montgomery, Go to the Legislature for funds. Strike while the iron is hot, or similarly, while the ruins were still smoldering. BECURDS llld East 1837 Nishet Pathway v