Manasseh Cutler Hall: First College West of the Alleghenies

The brick building at the center of Ohio University's campus green is the oldest academic building in the old Northwest Territory. Cutler Hall, as it is known, was begun in eighteen sixteen and finished in eighteen nineteen, after a lightning strike hit the unfinished building. It is named for Manasseh Cutler, a New England minister and botanist who in seventeen eighty-seven lobbied Congress to set aside two townships of the Northwest Territory as a land grant for a university.

Ohio University received its charter in eighteen oh four, making it the first university in the territory that would eventually become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Cutler Hall was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-five. Today it houses the university president's office, on the same ground where the entire American Midwest got its start in higher education.