Washington and Jefferson: The First College West of the Alleghenies
Pennsylvania
In the years immediately after the Revolutionary War, three Presbyterian ministers rode west into the Pennsylvania frontier carrying the same belief: that the mountains should not mark the western edge of civilization. Each built a log cabin college in Washington County, Pennsylvania. Together, their work became Washington and Jefferson College, the oldest institution of higher learning west of the Allegheny Mountains.
John McMillan arrived in seventeen seventy-five and, by seventeen eighty, had established a log cabin school near his church in Chartiers. Thaddeus Dod built his own in Lower Ten Mile in seventeen eighty-one. Joseph Smith added a third. All three were graduates of the College of New Jersey, the institution later known as Princeton, and all three believed that training young men in classical learning was inseparable from planting the Christian faith on the frontier.
Two separate institutions eventually emerged from those beginnings. Washington College traced to an academy that was rechartered as a college in eighteen oh six, one of the first colleges in America named for George Washington. Jefferson College, chartered in Canonsburg in eighteen oh two, honored the other great Virginian of the founding generation.
The two colleges merged in eighteen sixty-five, the same year the Civil War ended, into Washington and Jefferson College. The union made practical sense: both drew from the same Presbyterian constituency in southwestern Pennsylvania, and both competed for the same small pool of students and donors.
Among the college's most notable alumni are Speaker of the House James G. Blaine and Secretary of the Treasury Benjamin Bristow. The college also educated a string of Pennsylvania politicians and jurists who shaped the laws of a state that itself shaped the nation.
The campus in Washington, Pennsylvania still occupies the site that has housed a college since the seventeen eighties, a continuity that places it among the oldest educational communities in the American interior.
