Frostburg State University: Built on a Coal Miner's Dollar

The university sitting on the hillside above you owes its existence not to wealthy donors or state planners, but to the coal miners of western Maryland.

In eighteen ninety-eight, the Maryland General Assembly authorized a second State Normal School and appropriated twenty thousand dollars to construct a building. There was one catch: no money to buy the land. So the town of Frostburg took matters into its own hands. Residents passed a hat, and local coal miners contributed directly from their paychecks, pooling about two thousand dollars to purchase the two-acre parcel on which the university now stands. They were buying an education for their children, something the mines could never provide.

The school's first building, Old Main, was completed in nineteen hundred. Two years later, on September fifteenth, nineteen oh two, the first fifty-seven students arrived for class. The only course of study was a two-year elementary-education program. The entire institution consisted of one building, twenty-two classrooms, and what was reportedly the most extensive library in Allegany County.

J. Benson Oder, the editor of the Frostburg Mining Journal, had campaigned relentlessly for the school. He understood that in a coal community, education was the one thing that could outlast the seams. The coal industry in western Maryland was already in long decline by the nineteen twenties, and the economy of the entire region would eventually hollow out. But the school survived.

Frostburg evolved from a teacher's college into a liberal arts institution in nineteen sixty, and in nineteen eighty-seven it officially became Frostburg State University, part of the University System of Maryland. Today it enrolls roughly four thousand students. The miners who scraped together those two thousand dollars could not have imagined it. But they started it.