Asbury College, Wilmore
Near Lexington, Kentucky
Wilmore grew up around a college. In eighteen ninety, a Methodist evangelist named John Wesley Hughes opened a school here, a Methodist minister who had studied at Vanderbilt. He chose Wilmore because the little town sat along his preaching circuit and its people were willing to help pay for the buildings.
It began as Kentucky Holiness College, as a small school and was renamed the next year Asbury College to honor Bishop Francis Asbury, the founder of American Methodism. The school took its place in the Holiness revival movement sweeping the country at the time, and over the years it became known for spontaneous campus revivals that drew national attention.
In twenty ten the school became Asbury University. This marker remembers the college at the heart of the town.
