A brief history of Ohio University
Fourth-grader's project traces university's early days
Curious about Ohio University's history?
So is fourth-grader Sarah White of Bay Village, Ohio.
With a cousin currently enrolled at OU and several alumni in her family, Sarah recently began to wonder about universities and their histories. So when it came time to select a topic for her Ohio history project, she chose to study OU's founding and contacted George Bain, head of Archives and Special Collections, for help.
Sarah created a poster board and speech about the university's founding, and later wrote Bain to thank him and deliver news of her project's success. She earned a 6 out of 6 points, making her one of only two students with a perfect score in her class.
We enjoyed reading Sarah's project and wanted to share it with our alumni. The text from her speech and photos of her project board are posted below.
Ohio University history fair project
By Sarah White
Before I did my Ohio history project, I never thought about the history of colleges. I just thought someone started it and people started coming. Now I know it is way more complicated than that. I will tell you about Ohio's first university, Ohio University, home of the Bobcats.
First I will tell you what happened before it opened.
There were two main founders --Manasseh Cutler and Rufus Putnam. They came from the east right after the Revolutionary War to the middle of nowhere to settle the land in the new Northwest Territory. The first thing they wanted to do was start a university. They named the new town Athens because they wanted it to be a center of learning, just like Athens, Greece.
They wanted their new country to be a better country and they thought people needed to be educated to do that. This quote from Manasseh Cutler is carved on the entrance to the college: Religion and morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.
The first three students came 1808. They weren't ready for college work so the first student didn't graduate until 1815. One of the first graduates was Thomas Ewing, who later became a U.S. Senator for Ohio. OU really had trouble growing. You can see on this timeline that it took over 100 years to finally get the population of students over 120. In 1916 the population finally got over 120.
Some of the reasons I think that it took so long to grow were: There was a river going right through the college and it would flood. Also, there were pigs that ran around and squealed at people trying to get to their classes. And like I said earlier, it was in the middle of nowhere and people didn't have a lot of ways to get around.
In recent times, all these problems have improved a lot. More people are educated and want to go to college. Now the pigs are gone. It's easy to get here, only four hours from Cleveland. And they re-routed the river so it doesn't flood so much. There are now 16,800 students. Some of the students come from all over the world. 44 are from Bay Village. There are some famous OU graduates like George Voinovich, our current U.S. Senator, and Matt Lauer from the "Today Show."
It's good OU was built. It provides jobs to people, people come to Ohio from all over the world, and just like Manasseh Cutler and Rufus Putnam wanted, more people in Ohio can get an education.
