Ohio Wesleyan University

In the spring of eighteen forty-two, citizens of Delaware, Ohio raised money to buy a former hotel and turn it into a university. Their Methodist minister had challenged them to build an institution of, in his words, the highest order. They accepted. What they created, chartered by the Ohio Legislature, was Ohio Wesleyan University, one of the most distinctive small liberal arts colleges in the American Midwest.

The College of Liberal Arts opened in eighteen forty-four as a men's college. In eighteen fifty-three, a separate Ohio Wesleyan Female College opened in Delaware, and in eighteen seventy-seven the two institutions merged , making Ohio Wesleyan one of the earliest coeducational universities in the United States at a time when women's access to higher education was fiercely contested.

The campus grew through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into the grid of redbrick and limestone buildings that still defines it today. Delaware's small-city charm gave Ohio Wesleyan a distinctive setting: neither isolated rural campus nor urban university, but a place woven into the daily life of a county seat.

The university's tradition of civic engagement has deep roots. It was a stop on antislavery networks in the antebellum era. Its international programs have long connected the campus to global affairs. The university has also sent graduates into journalism, politics, medicine, and the arts across nearly two centuries.

Notable alumni include Branch Rickey, the baseball executive who signed Jackie Robinson to break Major League Baseball's color barrier, and Charles Fairbanks, Vice President of the United States under Theodore Roosevelt. The university has remained, through all the pressures facing small liberal arts institutions, committed to the founding idea: that a town, a church, and a group of determined people can build something that outlasts all of them.