Transylvania University: The First College West of the Alleghenies

In seventeen eighty, the year the first permanent settlers were building their cabins in what would become Lexington, the Virginia legislature chartered a school called Transylvania Seminary, its name drawn from the Latin for across the woods. It was a statement of ambition as much as geography. The founders wanted a college in the wilderness.

Transylvania made its way to Lexington and eventually became one of the most distinguished institutions of learning in the young American republic. During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, under the leadership of the physician and educator Horace Holley, it briefly rivaled eastern universities. Its medical department trained hundreds of physicians who went on to practice across the frontier South and West.

Its law school produced senators, governors, and cabinet secretaries. Two United States vice presidents, John C. Breckinridge and Richard Mentor Johnson, studied here.

So did Stephen F. Austin, the founder of Texas. Henry Clay was affiliated with the school, as were most of the Kentucky gentry who moved in and out of Lexington's professional life.

The institution embodied the conviction, common among the Founding generation's successors, that the West could be civilized through education. The school contracted after Holley's death in eighteen twenty-seven, eventually becoming the small liberal arts college you see on the north side of downtown Lexington today. Its Old Morrison building still stands, a Greek Revival landmark from the early eighteen thirties that watched the entire arc of antebellum Lexington pass before its columns, the prosperity, the politics, and all the contradictions.