Highland Community College: Kansas's First College

The campus you're approaching in Doniphan County is the oldest site of higher education in Kansas, and its origins are tangled up in the same missionary impulse that brought Protestant churches westward into Native lands during the eighteen forties.

Two Presbyterian ministers, Samuel Irvin and William Hamilton, arrived in northeast Kansas in eighteen thirty-seven and eighteen thirty-eight to work with the Ioway people. Their mission station sat right along the Missouri River, and for years they ran a boarding school for Ioway children. By the eighteen fifties, as the Kansas Territory was being organized and waves of settlers were pushing in, the ministers saw an opportunity to build something more permanent. On December twenty-sixth, eighteen fifty-seven, a meeting of the local presbytery voted not to establish a modest academy as planned, but to charter a full university.

Governor Denver signed the charter on February ninth, eighteen fifty-eight, making Highland University one of the first colleges established in Kansas Territory. Samuel Irvin personally constructed Irvin Hall, the very first building on campus. The school grew through the Civil War and into the Reconstruction era, educating the sons and daughters of settlers who were flooding into northeast Kansas.

But the late nineteenth century was hard on small religious colleges. Highland University struggled financially for decades. Enrollment dipped, endowments ran thin, and by the early twentieth century the institution reorganized as a junior college. Over more than a hundred and sixty years it went through eight name changes before settling on Highland Community College.

What remained constant was the institution's role as a gateway for people in a rural corner of Kansas who needed higher education close to home. The town of Highland itself never grew much beyond a few hundred people, yet the college persisted. Today it serves students from a broad multi-county area in northeast Kansas, offering associate degrees and technical programs.

The connection to the Ioway mission is quietly embedded in the campus geography. The original mission church, which Irvin and Hamilton built in eighteen forty-three, still stands nearby, one of the oldest surviving churches in the state. The college and the church together form a kind of archaeological layer cake: first mission, then university, then community college, all on the same ground where the Kansas frontier met the ambitions of nineteenth-century Protestantism.