The University of Scranton, Coal Town to Jesuit Campus

The University of Scranton was founded in eighteen eighty-eight as Saint Thomas College by Bishop William O'Hara, Scranton's first Catholic bishop, who blessed a single granite cornerstone with almost no resources in hand. The first sixty-two students arrived four years later in eighteen ninety-two. For decades the school was run by the Christian Brothers, earning university status in nineteen thirty-eight.

Then in nineteen forty-two, nineteen Jesuits arrived to take over administration, transforming it into one of twenty-seven Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States. Rising alongside the anthracite coal industry that built Scranton, the university outlasted the mines and today serves as one of the city's anchor institutions.