Oklahoma City University

The campus you are near has been educating Oklahomans since before Oklahoma was a state. Oklahoma City University traces its roots to nineteen oh one, just months after the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache lands were thrown open to white settlement, when Methodist Church leaders decided the territory needed a university.

They called it Epworth University, named for the English village where John Wesley was born. Construction began in nineteen oh two on the northwest side of Oklahoma City. Classes started in nineteen oh four, the year the Santa Fe Railway was still the fastest way out of town, and about one hundred students enrolled that first fall.

Epworth struggled. Funding was inconsistent and Methodist church politics complicated. The original institution closed in nineteen eleven. A reorganized version opened in Oklahoma City as Oklahoma City College in nineteen nineteen, renamed Oklahoma City University in nineteen twenty-four. What the early founders had in common across all those name changes was a commitment to educating men and women together in a territory and later a state that did not always embrace that idea easily.

Over the following decades OCU built a reputation in law, music, and dance. Its Wanda L. Bass School of Music became one of the better conservatory programs in the region. Its law school, founded in nineteen forty-seven, has trained a significant share of Oklahoma's bench and bar. The university remained formally affiliated with the United Methodist Church, the same Protestant tradition that planted it in the red clay of Oklahoma Territory before statehood.

Today the campus sits in an established residential neighborhood just northwest of downtown Oklahoma City, about a mile from where the original Epworth building once stood. The building is gone. The university is not.