Log College, the Rustic School That Built Princeton

Around seventeen twenty-seven, a Presbyterian minister named William Tennent built a small log building on his property in what is now Warminster, Pennsylvania. He called it a school. His critics called it a log college, meaning to mock it. The name stuck, and so did the institution. The building measured only about twenty feet by twenty feet, and George Whitefield's journal described it as very plain. A state historical marker commemorates the site.

Log College was the first academy in America dedicated to training Presbyterian ministers. It was a one-room frontier schoolhouse with no endowment, no charter, and no facilities beyond what Tennent himself provided. What it had was rigor. Its graduates became some of the most influential revivalist preachers of the Great Awakening. Among them were Samuel Blair, John Rowland, Charles Beatty, Samuel Finley, and Tennent's own son, William Tennent Junior.

When Tennent died in seventeen forty-six and the school closed, his former students refused to let the enterprise end. Several of them helped found the College of New Jersey in Princeton in seventeen forty-six, the institution now known as Princeton University. Several Log College men became trustees of the new college, and Samuel Finley later served as its fifth president. Dozens of other colleges trace their roots to this patch of ground. The log building is long gone, but the lineage it started is still very much alive.