Kenyon College: Bishops, Poets, and Presidents in Knox County

Kenyon College sits on a wooded hill called Gambier in Knox County, Ohio, and it is the oldest private college in the state, founded in eighteen twenty-four by one of the more determined characters in the early history of American religion.

Philander Chase became the first Episcopal bishop of Ohio in eighteen eighteen and was immediately confronted by a problem: there was almost no trained Episcopal clergy on the Ohio frontier. The church back east was reluctant to fund a new seminary in what many Episcopalians considered the wilderness. Chase decided to go around them. He sailed to England in eighteen twenty-three and personally solicited donations from British aristocrats, including Lord Kenyon and Lord Gambier, both of whom gave generously. The college was named for Lord Kenyon, and the town that grew up around it was named for Lord Gambier.

Chase purchased eight thousand acres of Knox County land and established the college in eighteen twenty-five. He wanted distance from the temptations of city life and from the influence of other denominations, so he built in the woods, away from any existing settlement. The resulting isolation became one of the defining characteristics of Kenyon: a small, intensely literary college tucked into rural Ohio, far from everywhere.

That literary identity deepened in the late nineteen thirties when a poet and critic named John Crowe Ransom arrived to teach. Ransom founded the Kenyon Review in nineteen thirty-nine, one of the most influential literary quarterlies in American history. Under his guidance, students included Robert Lowell, who would win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and Randall Jarrell, one of the defining voices of mid-century American letters.

The alumni list extends further: Rutherford B. Hayes, the nineteenth president of the United States; Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's secretary of war; E.L. Doctorow, the novelist; and Paul Newman, who graduated from Kenyon in nineteen forty-nine before his acting career took hold.

Kenyon remains a small college of about two thousand students, still on its wooded hill, still publishing the Kenyon Review.