Ohio University: The First on the Frontier

When the Northwest Ordinance of seventeen eighty-seven was passed, Congress set aside two townships of land in the new territory specifically for a university. The idea was that a republic required educated citizens, and the republic was about to expand into territory that had no schools of any kind. Seventeen years later, on February eighteenth, eighteen oh four, Ohio University became the first university chartered in the entire Northwest Territory, predating any institution in Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Minnesota.

The location chosen was Athens, a small town in the hill country of southeastern Ohio, settled in the seventeen nineties by New England emigrants who named it after the ancient seat of learning. The Ohio Company of Associates, the group that had purchased a massive tract of the Ohio Territory from Congress, had reserved the two townships specified by the Ordinance, and the income from their sale was to fund the university in perpetuity. In practice the early decades were financially precarious, the endowment land slow to sell, the student body small. The university nearly closed several times.

What saved it was persistence, and eventually, change. The Morrill Act of eighteen sixty-two, which created the land-grant university system, redirected that federal function to Ohio State, but Ohio University found its own path. By the mid-twentieth century it had become one of Ohio's major research universities, with a school of journalism that has produced a long list of prominent broadcast and print journalists, and a college of osteopathic medicine founded in nineteen seventy-five, the first such school at a public university in Ohio.

The campus in Athens is built across a series of low hills above the Hocking River. The original College Green, a square of elms and open lawn dating to the early nineteenth century, remains the physical center of the university. Ohio University now enrolls roughly twenty thousand students and serves one of the most economically distressed corners of Appalachian Ohio. It has been, since eighteen oh four, the primary institution of higher learning for a region that would otherwise have very few.