College of Idaho

The College of Idaho, founded in eighteen ninety-one by Presbyterian minister William Boone, is the oldest private college in the state. Boone arrived in Caldwell with almost nothing and persuaded local ranchers and merchants to donate land and labor. The school opened its doors to nineteen students and has operated continuously ever since, surviving droughts, wars, and the Depression without closing.

Today it enrolls around a thousand students and is known for a rigorous liberal-arts curriculum. Its campus centerpiece, a quad lined with century-old trees, reflects the ambition Boone had from the start: to plant a serious academic institution at the western edge of the frontier, not as an afterthought, but as the thing that would make a place worth staying.