Oxford, Georgia, Emory's Original Home

Oxford, Georgia, is a town that was built for a college. In eighteen thirty-six the Methodist Episcopal Church received a charter to found Emory College, named for Bishop John Emory. The college's planners chose to name its home Oxford, after Oxford University in England, which the founders of Methodism had attended.

A surveyor laid out the campus and town together in eighteen thirty-seven, the cornerstone of the first building went in the following spring, and classes began in September eighteen thirty-eight. The town was formally incorporated on December twenty-third, eighteen thirty-nine. For nearly eighty years, Oxford was Emory.

Then, in nineteen fifteen, the university relocated to Atlanta, taking the Emory name and most of the faculty with it. The original campus survived as Oxford College, a two-year liberal arts branch of Emory that still operates here today, with its antebellum buildings intact.