Willamette University and the Oldest College West
Near Salem, Oregon
The campus directly south of the state capitol is one of the oldest educational institutions in the American West. Willamette University traces its origins to eighteen forty-two, when Jason Lee's Methodist mission established the Oregon Institute, a school intended to educate settlers and the children of indigenous people in the growing community. By the fall of eighteen forty-four, the institute had opened with five students and one teacher. That small beginning makes it the oldest college west of the Rocky Mountains, predating the University of Oregon, Oregon State, and nearly every other institution in the Pacific Northwest.
The Oregon Institute quickly became more than a school. Its building hosted the first meeting of the territorial legislature in eighteen forty-four and the first territorial court shortly after. It was a government and a college at the same time, because in the early eighteen forties there were no other buildings large enough or stable enough to hold either.
The school was chartered as Wallamet University in eighteen fifty-two, the name changed to its current spelling in eighteen seventy. Over the following decades, Willamette founded the first medical school and the first law school in the Pacific Northwest, training the doctors and lawyers who would serve a rapidly growing region.
Today the university's sixty-nine-acre campus is a leafy pocket between the capitol and downtown Salem, close enough to state government that students routinely intern in the legislature and state agencies. That proximity was not accidental. The people who built the Oregon Institute and then Willamette University were building a state, and they placed their school right next to where the state would be governed.
