Muskingum University: Where John Glenn Learned to Reach

The small town of New Concord, Ohio, sits in the rolling hills of Muskingum County along what was once the National Road, and it is home to one of the oldest colleges in the American interior and the boyhood of one of the most celebrated Americans of the twentieth century.

Muskingum College, as it was originally known, received its charter from the Ohio Legislature on March eighteenth, eighteen thirty-seven. It was founded by Presbyterian and Associate Reformed Presbyterian ministers who wanted to educate the sons and daughters of Ohio farming families in the classical tradition. From its earliest years the college admitted women on equal terms with men, a decision ahead of most of its peers in eighteen fifty-four.

John Glenn was born in Cambridge, Ohio, and grew up in New Concord, attending local schools before enrolling at Muskingum College in the late nineteen thirties to study engineering. The Second World War interrupted his studies; he left to join the Marine Corps, flew fifty-nine combat missions in the Pacific, and then added sixty-three more in the Korean War, earning six Distinguished Flying Crosses. He never quite finished the degree, but Muskingum later made that right.

On February twentieth, nineteen sixty-two, Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, completing three circuits of the globe aboard Friendship Seven in just under five hours. The achievement came after the Soviet Union had already sent Yuri Gagarin around the planet, and the pressure on the American space program to answer was immense. Glenn answered it with a precision reentry and a splashdown in the Atlantic that made him the most celebrated astronaut in American history.

He later served four terms as United States Senator from Ohio, ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in nineteen eighty-four, and in nineteen ninety-eight, at the age of seventy-seven, returned to space aboard the shuttle Discovery, becoming the oldest human being ever to fly in space. He died in twenty sixteen.

New Concord calls itself the hometown of an astronaut. Muskingum, now a university, maintains the John and Annie Glenn Historic Site on the campus grounds.