The Old Liberal Arts College West of the Mississippi

The campus that Centenary College of Louisiana occupies today on Centenary Boulevard was not where the institution started. The college was chartered by the Louisiana state legislature in eighteen twenty-five as the College of Louisiana, in the town of Jackson, roughly a hundred miles southeast of Shreveport. In eighteen forty-six it took the name Centenary College of Louisiana, drawing on the alumni of a separate Mississippi institution called Centenary College.

The Methodist Episcopal Church controlled the institution through the nineteenth century, and by the early nineteen hundreds a civic group called the Shreveport Progressive League made an offer the church found difficult to refuse: come here, and the city will support you. The college moved to Shreveport and opened its new campus in nineteen oh eight. What it had been, back in eighteen twenty-five, was the oldest chartered liberal arts college west of the Mississippi River.

That distinction traveled with it to Shreveport, where it still applies today. The college suspended operations during the Civil War when students enlisted, and both Confederate and Union forces occupied its buildings at various points during the conflict. It came back, as institutions tend to do when a community decides they are worth coming back.

Today Centenary enrolls roughly seven hundred students across twenty-five undergraduate programs, a small institution with a long pedigree. The original Jackson campus is now a Louisiana state historic site, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a kind of preserved origin for an institution that chose to move and took its history with it.