Washington and Jefferson College: Log Cabins to Roger Goodell
Pennsylvania
In the seventeen seventies, three young graduates of the College of New Jersey, the school that would become Princeton, rode out past the Appalachian Mountains into the Pennsylvania frontier to plant Presbyterian churches and, apparently, colleges. John McMillan was the most influential of the three. He arrived in what is now Washington County in seventeen seventy-five, built his church, and within a few years had also built a log-cabin school behind it. His two colleagues did the same. These were not quaint little reading circles. They were the first institutions of higher education west of the Appalachians, operating in an era when Pittsburgh itself was barely a garrison.
Two of those early schools evolved into rival colleges. Washington Academy was chartered in seventeen eighty-seven and was re-chartered as Washington College in eighteen six, while Jefferson College was incorporated in eighteen two, the two campuses about twelve miles apart. The rivalry lasted decades, and the schools finally merged in eighteen sixty-five to form Washington and Jefferson College, which sits today in the town of Washington, Pennsylvania, roughly thirty miles south of Pittsburgh.
What makes the college remarkable beyond its age is what it produced with a student body that has never exceeded about fifteen hundred undergraduates. The school trained a disproportionate number of lawyers, judges, and legislators in the eighteen hundreds, enough that it became known informally as a factory for public servants. In the twentieth century it added a different kind of commissioner: Roger Goodell, who graduated from Washington and Jefferson in nineteen eighty-one with an economics degree, and who has served as Commissioner of the National Football League since two thousand six, one of the most powerful positions in American sports. The log cabins built by three Princeton men in the Pennsylvania frontier became the training ground for the man who now oversees a league worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
