Bucknell University: A Baptist College on the Susquehanna

The campus that rises above the West Branch of the Susquehanna River just south of Lewisburg began with a Baptist ambition and a specific problem. In eighteen forty-six, a group of Pennsylvania Baptists decided that central Pennsylvania needed a serious institution of learning , one that could educate both men and women, train ministers, and provide the kind of rigorous schooling that until then had meant a long journey east to the established colleges. They called it the University at Lewisburg, applied to the state legislature for a charter, and received it on February fifth of that year, with the condition that they raise one hundred thousand dollars before the institution could open fully. They raised it.

The first commencement, in August of eighteen fifty-one, was attended by James Buchanan, then a prominent Pennsylvania statesman who would become the fifteenth President of the United States four years later. It was an early signal that the school would be woven into the broader fabric of American public life.

Women were admitted in eighteen eighty-three, and the university was renamed in eighteen eighty-six to honor William Bucknell, a Philadelphia philanthropist and major benefactor whose gifts helped ensure the school's financial stability. By that point Bucknell had established itself as one of the genuine academic institutions of the mid-Atlantic interior , not as large or as old as the colonial colleges of the eastern seaboard, but serious, well-resourced, and producing graduates who went on to reshape American culture.

Among those graduates: Philip Roth, who finished here in nineteen fifty-four and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and reshape American literature; Christy Mathewson, one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history and a charter member of the Baseball Hall of Fame; and a long roster of executives, scientists, and public servants. The four-hundred-and-fifty-acre campus today remains one of the defining institutions of the Susquehanna Valley.