Blount College to the University of Tennessee

The institution that became the University of Tennessee was chartered in September of seventeen ninety-four, before the state of Tennessee existed, as Blount College, named for the territorial governor. Its first classes met in a downtown building donated by James White, the city's founder. The first president was the Reverend Samuel Carrick. The college admitted women from its early years, an unusual practice for the era, though the extent and continuity of that admission varied.

The institution went through several names and several near-collapses over the following decades. In eighteen oh seven it became East Tennessee College, a state institution. It closed and reopened. In eighteen sixty-nine, following the Civil War, it became Tennessee's land-grant institution under the Morrill Act, which Congress had passed in eighteen sixty-two to create a network of colleges focused on agriculture, engineering, and the practical arts. In eighteen seventy-nine the legislature renamed it the University of Tennessee.

During the Civil War, the campus on the Hill was occupied by both Confederate and Union forces at different points. The Confederates used its buildings as headquarters and hospital. When Union General Burnside took Knoxville in eighteen sixty-three, his engineers enclosed the three main buildings in earthen fortifications they named Fort Byington. The university did not formally reopen until after the war.

The Hill campus, so called because the forty acres bought for it in the early nineteenth century were elevated ground just west of downtown, is still the university's core. The institution now enrolls more than thirty thousand students and is the flagship of the Tennessee higher education system. Its athletic programs are among the most visible in the South, the orange a shade so specific to the university that it has its own name: Tennessee Orange.

The land-grant mission, education in service of practical democratic citizenship, was what Blount College was chartered to do in seventeen ninety-four. The university is still on that hill, two hundred thirty years later.