Capital University: Ohio's Oldest in the Suburbs
Near Columbus, Ohio
Just east of Columbus, in the quiet suburb of Bexley, sits Capital University, the oldest university in Central Ohio and one of the oldest Lutheran-affiliated universities in North America. Its founding, in eighteen thirty, predates Ohio State University by forty years.
The institution began not as a university at all, but as the German Theological Seminary of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Ohio, opened in Canton with six students. Every class was taught in German. Its mission was straightforward: train ministers for the growing German Lutheran immigrant communities spreading across the Ohio frontier.
The seminary moved several times in its early decades, first to Columbus, then to a building on South High Street, before the Ohio General Assembly granted a university charter in eighteen fifty. Land was purchased in Bexley, and in May of eighteen seventy-six, faculty and students made their final move to the current campus grounds.
Over the following century, Capital grew from a seminary into a full liberal arts university, adding a law school and graduate programs while holding onto its Lutheran identity through merger after merger in American Protestantism. Today it is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
The university's most surprising alumnus may be Robert S. Graetz, a Lutheran pastor who graduated in the nineteen forties and then moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in nineteen fifty-five, just in time to become the only white minister to openly support the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Graetz and his family were bombed twice for it. His path from this campus to that front line is a thread connecting the German immigrant Lutheran piety of mid-Ohio to one of the defining moments of American civil rights.
The campus sits just off Broad Street in Bexley, easily missed from the interstate, but its nearly two centuries of history make it one of the quieter anchor points of Central Ohio's intellectual life.
