Spring Hill College and Bishop Portier's Gamble

Six miles west of downtown, on a wooded hill with a panoramic view of Mobile Bay, sits the oldest private institution of higher learning in Alabama. Spring Hill College was founded in eighteen thirty by Michael Portier, Mobile's first Roman Catholic bishop, who had arrived from France at the age of twenty-six to lead a diocese that covered everything west of the Chattahoochee River and south of Tennessee.

Portier purchased three hundred acres of ridgeline land and brought two priests and four seminarians from France to staff the school. The first semester opened on May first, eighteen thirty, with thirty students. Within two years enrollment had climbed to nearly one hundred and thirty. The college is also the first Catholic college in the Southeast, the third oldest Jesuit college in the United States, and the fifth oldest Catholic college in the country overall.

Portier's calculation was straightforward: Mobile was the only city of any size in Alabama, a port city with commercial ties to New Orleans and France, and it needed educated priests and lawyers and doctors if the colony of French settlers was to hold its character. The Jesuits took over from the diocesan clergy in eighteen forty-seven and have run the institution since.

The campus retains several antebellum and nineteenth-century buildings under a canopy of live oaks. It remains a small liberal arts college, with an enrollment of under one thousand students, the oldest continuously operating academic institution in the state.