Wilson College

Wilson College in Chambersburg was chartered by the Pennsylvania Legislature on March twenty-fourth, eighteen sixty-nine, making it one of the first colleges for women in the United States. The school was named for Sarah Wilson, a donor whose gift helped buy the campus land. The campus opened in September eighteen seventy on property bought from Colonel A.

K. McClure, whose home had been burned in the Civil War. Wilson remains a small liberal-arts institution today, and its founding story is a quiet example of how one donor's gift, made against the grain of the era, shaped generations of women's education in south-central Pennsylvania.