Monongahela College
Jefferson, Greene County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
The first Baptist college in western Pa. It was begun by Ten Mile Baptist Assn. in 1867, opened in 1869, and in 1871 was chartered by the legislature. It operated 1869-1888, reopened 1890, and finally closed 1894. The 1871 college building is 300 yards north.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In the years just after the Civil War, the Ten Mile Baptist Association set out to plant higher learning in the hills of southwestern Pennsylvania, founding what became the first Baptist college west of the Alleghenies in the state. Chartered by the legislature in 1871, Monongahela College opened its doors to students in a rural corner of Greene County, but like many small denominational schools of the era it struggled to stay solvent, closing, reopening, and finally shutting for good in 1894. Its brick 1871 college building still stands nearby as a reminder of that ambition.
Why it matters
The college reflects the wave of church-founded schools that carried education into rural America during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, when access to college was still a fragile, hard-won thing.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Greene Academy
Carmichaels, PA · est. 1953
Established by act of the Pennsylvania legislature in 1810 and aided by a state grant and local subscriptions, Greene Academy brought advanced schooling to Carmichaels when much of western Pennsylvania was still frontier country. For half a century it stood among the leading academies west of the mountains, educating young people far from the older schools of the East. Its old building still stands nearby.
Greene County
Waynesburg, PA · est. 1982
Formed from Washington County in 1796, Greene County was named for Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene, and its seat, Waynesburg, honors the fiery General Anthony Wayne. In the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania, this was hard-won frontier country in the early republic. Waynesburg College was founded here in 1849, and the area near Ten Mile Creek gave rise to Governor Edward Martin.
Waynesburg College
Waynesburg, PA · est. 1949
In 1849, on the rolling hills of Greene County in Pennsylvania's southwestern corner, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church founded Waynesburg College, and the state chartered it the following year. In an era when higher education was almost entirely a male preserve, the young school made a remarkable choice: in 1857 it conferred degrees on women, becoming one of the first two Pennsylvania colleges to do so. That decision placed a small frontier-country college decades ahead of most of American academia.
James G. Blaine
West Brownsville, PA · est. 1947
James G. Blaine was born on this site in 1830 to a family of Pennsylvania pioneer stock and took his degree at nearby Washington College. Moving to Maine in 1854, he rose to become one of the towering political figures of the Gilded Age — a powerful member of Congress, a party leader, and twice secretary of state. He came within a hair of the presidency in one of the era's most bitterly fought campaigns.