page_title: History of Georgetown University
section_title: Founding
hierarchical_section_title: History of Georgetown University / Founding
caption_attribution_description: The doorway over Georgetown University's White-Gravenor building, illustrating the two dates 1634 and 1789.
context_page_description: The history of Georgetown University spans nearly four hundred years, from the early European settlement of America to the present day. Georgetown University has grown with both its city, Washington, D.C., and the United States, each of which date their founding to the period from 1788 to 1790. Georgetown's origins are in the establishment of the Maryland colony in the seventeenth-century. Bishop John Carroll established the school at its present location by the Potomac River after the American Revolution allowed for free religious practice.
  The role of the Society of Jesus in the school's operation has evolved from that of founders and financiers to faculty and advisers. Their focus on liberal studies and religious pluralism have helped to give the school its identity. Georgetown was also affected by its times, including the American Civil War, which disrupted the growing school and significantly changed its student body. University presidents like Patrick Francis Healy modernized the institution into an active research university with several graduate and undergraduate schools, and oversaw the expansion of educational opportunities on campus, around the city, and abroad.
context_section_description: The history of Georgetown University traces back to two formative events, in 1634 and 1789. Until 1851, the school used 1788, the start of construction on the Old South building, as its founding date. In that year a copy-edit in the college catalog began mislabeling the construction as beginning in 1789. This was discovered in preparation for the centennial celebration in 1889, at which point rather than correct the annual, the date of Georgetown's foundation was fixed to the date January 23, 1789.
caption: Above the door of White-Gravenor Hall are the dates 1634 and 1789. Further up are five seals, which mark the three prior incarnations of Jesuit schools in Maryland, the year John Carroll attended the Bohemia Manor school, and the present school at Georgetown Heights.[2]
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