Franklin & Marshall College

Here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, sits one of the oldest colleges in the United States, Franklin and Marshall, whose origins reach back to seventeen eighty-seven, the same year the Constitution was signed.

The story begins with two entirely separate institutions. Franklin College was chartered on June sixth, seventeen eighty-seven, and named for Benjamin Franklin himself, who donated two hundred pounds sterling to help get it off the ground. Its founding board was formidable: five signers of the Declaration of Independence, two delegates to the Constitutional Convention, and seven officers of the Revolutionary War. The college was conceived as a German-language alternative to the University of Pennsylvania, reflecting Lancaster's large German immigrant community, and it opened on a site that had previously been a brewery.

Decades later, a second institution arose. Marshall College, named for Chief Justice John Marshall, was founded in eighteen thirty-six in Mercersburg under the sponsorship of the German Reformed Church. In eighteen fifty-three, the two colleges merged in Lancaster to form Franklin and Marshall. Their first president of the Board of Trustees was James Buchanan, who would go on to become the fifteenth President of the United States.

For nearly two centuries the college has turned out graduates who left a mark on American culture. Roy Scheider, class of nineteen fifty-five, became one of Hollywood's most memorable actors, Brody in Jaws, Joe Gideon in All That Jazz. Oscar-winning director Franklin Schaffner, class of nineteen forty-two, gave the world Patton and Planet of the Apes. Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, class of nineteen forty-eight, presided over the sport through the turbulent free-agency era. And playwright James Lapine, class of nineteen seventy-one, won the Pulitzer Prize for Sunday in the Park with George.

The college today enrolls roughly two thousand students as one of the nation's preeminent liberal arts institutions, still carrying the names of the Founding generation's two most consequential intellectuals, one of whom helped fund its first classroom.