page_title: History of Northwestern University
section_title: Foundation
hierarchical_section_title: History of Northwestern University / Foundation
caption_attribution_description: English: Source: NU150 - Photo Gallery - Evanston scenes, dated July 4, 1876.
context_page_description: The history of Northwestern University can be traced back to a May 31, 1850, meeting of nine prominent Chicago businessmen who shared a desire to establish a university to serve the Northwest Territories. On January 28, 1851, the Illinois General Assembly granted a charter to the Trustees of the North Western University making it the first recognized university in Illinois. While the original founders were devout Methodists and affiliated the university with Methodist Episcopal Church, they were committed to non-sectarian admissions.
  John Evans purchased 379 acres of land along Lake Michigan in 1853 and Philo Judson began developing the plans for what would become the city of Evanston. The first building, Old College, opened on November 5, 1855. As a private university that had to raise funds for construction, Northwestern sold $100 "perpetual scholarships" that entitled the purchaser and his heirs to free tuition. Northwestern admitted its first female students in 1869.
  Northwestern first fielded an intercollegiate football team in 1882, and later became a founding member of the Big Ten Conference.
context_section_description: In 1850, Chicago was only a 17-year-old city of 28,000 inhabitants that was increasingly becoming the center of trade for both steamships and railroads. The political and cultural environment of the mid-nineteenth century resulted in individual states granting charters to hundreds of small colleges rather than a few centralized national institutions as was typical in European countries. These colleges were highly sectarian and were motivated by the desire to both increase the quality of ministerial training as well as to discourage its young people from attending schools controlled by rival denominations. On May 31, 1850, John Evans, Grant Goodrich, Henry W. Clark, Andrew Brown, Orrington Lunt, Jabez Botsford, Richard Haney, Richard H. Blanchard, and Zodoc Hall met in a law office above a hardware store at 69 West Lake Street in Chicago and resolved that "the interests of sanctified learning require the immediate establishment of a university in the Northwest under the patronage of the Methodist Episcopal Church." While each of the founders had diverse educational, socioeconomic, and geographic backgrounds, they were all devout Methodists as well as successful and established businessmen, ministers, and lawyers within Chicago. Despite their evangelism, the founders were committed to the establishment of a non-sectarian institution reflecting both the worldly educational philosophy of the Methodist movement and the political realities of the Illinois state legislature adverse to chartering church-affiliated colleges.
  Goodrich was adept in drafting the charter and lobbying legislators who shared his abolitionist views and the charter was passed during the first session of the General Assembly and signed by Governor Augustus French on January 28, 1851. Constituted as the "Trustees of the North Western University," the new institution was the first university in Illinois and consisted of the founders as well as representatives from the neighboring Methodist conferences. Evans and Lunt initially each donated $5,000 to endow the university which permitted them to purchase 16 lots on the northeast corner of Jackson Boulevard and LaSalle Street for $8,000 as a potential site for the campus.
  In 1853, the trustees elected Clark T. Hinman as the first president of the university and committed to raising $200,000. Hinman insisted that a university, rather than a preparatory school, be constructed first and that it should be built outside of Chicago. Following Hinman's recommendation, Lunt began to survey for land that was both north of the city and abutting railways for a new university in the areas of Jefferson Park and Ridgeville. Unable to find available land on the north shore up to Lake Forest, the committee was ready to purchase farmland to the west of the city when Orrington Lunt insisted on one final visit to the present location.  A 360-acre (150 ha) parcel of dry, wooded bluffs overlooking Lake Michigan belonging to a Dr. John Foster (unrelated to Randolph S. Foster) was purchased by Evans for $25,000 in August 1853 as a site for the new campus. In 1855, the university charter was amended to declare that university property "shall be forever free from taxation for any kind and all purposes." The trustees aggressively used the property-tax-exempt status to purchase more of the surrounding farms and Northwestern land holdings grew as large as 680 acres (280 ha). In 1854, Philo Judson, Northwestern's business manager charged with surveying and plotting this real estate nicknamed the land "Evanston" in honor of founder John Evans. In 1857, the Illinois legislature changed the name of the village from Ridgeville to Evanston and it became an incorporated city in 1863. The university undertook a major development effort to drain the swamps, clear and grade the land, and donated or sold land to permit the construction of streets, parks, schools, waterworks, and churches. Between 1860 and 1870, Evanston's population had grown from 831 to 3,062.
  Hinman was also a fervent supporter of the nascent university and raised over $63,000 fr
caption: Fountain Square, Evanston, Illinois in 1876.
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