The College of Idaho: A Missionary's Wager on the Boise Valley

On October seventh, eighteen ninety-one, a Presbyterian home missionary named William Judson Boone opened a school for two students inside a church in Caldwell, Idaho. That wager on the frontier would make history as the first private liberal arts college in the state.

Boone had arrived in Caldwell in eighteen eighty-seven as a missionary for the Presbyterian Church. He found a young agricultural community on the Boise River that had almost no educational infrastructure beyond elementary schooling. Rather than simply minister to the community, Boone concluded that what it needed most was a college, and he set about building one with essentially nothing.

The first class met in the fall of eighteen ninety-one with a faculty of seven members and two enrolled students. Within a few years enrollment grew, the school obtained a formal charter under Idaho law in eighteen ninety-three, and a self-perpetuating Board of Trustees took charge of its governance. For a frontier institution, this legal structure was unusually stable and forward-thinking.

Boone served as president of the College of Idaho for forty-five years, until his death in nineteen thirty-six. Over those four and a half decades he guided the institution through droughts, economic panics, the Great War, Prohibition, and the early years of the Great Depression. His tenure is among the longest of any college president in American history, and his personal commitment to keeping the school alive through repeated financial crises is the reason it survived at all.

Caldwell sits about twenty-five miles west of Boise in the agricultural heartland of the Snake River plain. The College of Idaho remains the oldest private liberal arts college in the state, still occupying a campus in the same small city where Boone held his first class. Its size has always been modest, but its persistence across nearly one hundred forty years of Idaho history is itself a kind of monument to the missionary who refused to quit.