Cokesbury College: The First Methodist College in the World

Near this marker once stood Cokesbury College, the first Methodist college ever founded anywhere in the world. It was founded at Abingdon, Maryland, and opened in seventeen eighty-seven, named for the two bishops who championed it: Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury, the founding leaders of American Methodism. The school represented an ambitious vision for an educated American ministry at a moment when the new nation was still finding its institutions.

But it did not survive long. On December fourth of seventeen ninety-five, the building burned to the ground. A new building in Baltimore burned the next year, and the college ceased to exist.

Despite its brief life, Cokesbury stands as a founding moment in a tradition of Methodist higher education that eventually spread across the country, producing dozens of colleges and universities. The site here is a quiet monument to an institution that lasted only a decade but opened a long chapter.