page_title: Upsala College
section_title: Early history (1893–1924)
hierarchical_section_title: Upsala College / History / Early history (1893–1924)
caption_attribution_description: Upsala College's former campus in Kenilworth, New Jersey (USA) circa 1906
context_page_description: Upsala College was a private college affiliated with the Swedish-American Augustana Synod and located in East Orange in Essex County, New Jersey in the United States. Upsala was founded in 1893 in Brooklyn, in New York City, and moved to Kenilworth, and finally to East Orange in 1924. In the 1970s, Upsala considered moving to Wantage Township in rural Sussex County as East Orange's crime problem magnified and social conditions deteriorated. However, college administration and trustees chose to remain committed to East Orange. Declining enrollment and financial difficulties forced the school to close in 1995.
context_section_description: Upsala College was founded at the 1893 annual meeting of the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Augustana Synod in North America, known as the Augustana Synod—a Lutheran church body with roots in the Swedish immigrant community. The Augustana Synod placed an emphasis on mission, ecumenism, and social service. Meeting at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, the polity decided to open the college in Brooklyn, New York, in October 1893. The Synod chose a young minister, the Rev. Lars Herman Beck (1859–1935), as the college's first president. Beck, a Swedish immigrant to the United States, had received his Ph.D. from Yale University in the previous year and turned down a teaching position at Yale to assume the post at Upsala.
  The name Upsala was chosen to honor both the historic Uppsala University in Sweden and the Meeting of Uppsala.  That 1593 meeting—exactly 300 years before the founding of Upsala College—firmly established  Lutheran Orthodoxy in Sweden after the attempts by King John III to reintroduce Roman Catholic liturgy.
  On October 3, 1893, Upsala College opened in the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Bethlehem Church in Brooklyn. The first day, Beck began instruction with 16 students.  By the end of the year, Upsala had 75 students. Early instruction had been in Swedish as the student body largely consisted of Scandinavian immigrants. In 1897, the college moved to Kenilworth, New Jersey (formerly "New Orange, New Jersey") when the "New Orange Industrial Association" offered the young school fourteen acres of land. Upsala erected its first building on the Kenilworth campus in 1899.  The college granted its first Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degrees in 1905 to four students.  By 1910, Upsala offered Bachelor of Arts in modern and classical languages, and Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degrees in Mathematics and Sciences, while offering a three-year college preparatory program, instruction in music for preparing "teachers of music, organist and choir leaders, and in general to afford its students a musical education", instruction in commerce and business to "train young men and women for a business career" and in stenography for students seeking "to fill positions as stenographers and private secretaries."  While the college was identified by its connexion with the Swedish Lutheran community, Upsala was the first college in New Jersey to admit women, and it student body welcomed students from many other nationalities and religions. In 1908, the student body consisted of "79 Swedes, 2 Finns, 1 Jew, 1 'American', 1 Chinese, 1 Korean, and 1 Persian"
caption: In its early years, Upsala College was invited to build its campus in Kenilworth, New Jersey (seen here, circa 1906) where it operated for 25 years before moving to East Orange in 1924.
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