Oxford College of Emory: The Campus That Survived Sherman

About thirty-eight miles east of Atlanta, in the small town of Oxford, Georgia, there is a campus that has been there since before the Civil War and still functions today as the freshman and sophomore home of Emory University. It is one of the quieter historical footnotes along Interstate Twenty, and one of the more surprising ones.

Oxford College was founded in eighteen thirty-six by Georgia Methodists as Emory College, named for Bishop John Emory of Maryland. It was the first Emory, the original institution, predating the Atlanta campus by nearly eighty years. The college opened on a hill in Newton County with a handful of faculty and a conviction that the region needed an institution of higher learning that was both rigorous and Christian.

When the Civil War came to Georgia, it came close. William Tecumseh Sherman's army marched through Newton County in November of eighteen sixty-four during the March to the Sea. The town of Oxford itself was spared significant destruction, in part because Union soldiers used the college buildings as a hospital. The campus that might have been burned was instead occupied. Several antebellum buildings, including Phi Gamma Hall and Few Hall, survived. The college's small collection of scientific instruments, one of the earliest in the South, was scattered but not entirely destroyed.

After the war the college rebuilt. In nineteen fifteen, the Methodists decided to relocate the main university operations to Atlanta, where funding and a medical school connection made expansion possible. The Oxford campus became the junior division. It has remained that way ever since, a two-year residential college where Emory undergraduates spend their first years on the same land where the institution began.

The oldest building still standing dates to the eighteen fifties. Students walk past it every day on the way to class, most of them without knowing what the ground beneath it has seen.