Pacific Lutheran University: Norwegian Pioneers in Parkland

Pacific Lutheran University was not built by a church board in a comfortable office. It was built by Norwegian immigrants who had come to the Pacific Northwest with almost nothing and believed, with the intensity that frontier life sometimes produces, that their community needed a school.

The university was chartered by the State of Washington on December eleventh, eighteen ninety, about thirteen months after Washington itself became a state. Its founders were Norwegian Lutheran settlers who had begun arriving in the Puget Sound lowlands in the eighteen eighties, drawn by the timber industry and the cheap land that followed the railroad. They named it Pacific Lutheran Academy, and they built it in Parkland, a small community south of Tacoma, on a hundred and fifty-six wooded acres that still defines the campus today.

The early decades were precarious. The institution burned down once, nearly closed several times for lack of funds, and survived largely on the determination of the Scandinavian immigrant community it served. Lutheran congregations across the Northwest sent money and students. By the early twentieth century it had stabilized into a genuine liberal arts college, and by the nineteen fifties it had become a university in scope if not yet in name. It formally became Pacific Lutheran University in nineteen sixty.

Today the university enrolls roughly twenty-seven hundred students and is sponsored by the congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Pacific Northwest region. Its campus, shaded by Douglas firs and surrounded by the suburban sprawl of Pierce County, still carries the feeling of a place that was built to last by people who expected the effort to matter.

The founders were right about that much.