College of Idaho: Idaho's First Private College

The College of Idaho, here in Caldwell, is the oldest private liberal arts college in the state. It opened on October seventh, eighteen ninety-one, with a first class of nineteen students. The founder was William Judson Boone, a home missionary who arrived in Idaho in eighteen eighty-seven and decided the Territory needed a college before it was even a state.

Idaho achieved statehood in eighteen ninety, and Boone's school followed within a year. He served as president for forty-five years, until his death in nineteen thirty-six. The college remains independent today, with an enrollment of roughly one thousand students, still occupying the Caldwell campus Boone scraped together from frontier ambition and Presbyterian determination.