Messiah University
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Messiah University began in nineteen nine as the Messiah Bible School and Missionary Training Home, founded by the Brethren in Christ Church in a Harrisburg house belonging to its first president, Samuel Rogers Smith. The church needed trained workers for overseas mission fields, and Smith's home became the classroom. In nineteen eleven the school moved to the village of Grantham, where its first permanent building, Old Main, had just been finished.
By nineteen twenty-one it had added a junior college program, making it the second junior college in all of Pennsylvania. It grew into a full four-year college by the nineteen fifties and eventually a university. It remains one of the country's prominent evangelical liberal arts institutions.
