The Early Years
After a few years of operation, the school was renamed Indiana College. In 1829 the trustees appointed Andrew Wylie its first president. Wylie, a Presbyterian minister from Pennsylvania, had previously served as president of both Jefferson College and Washington College. Well-suited by background and temperament for the challenges of guiding the new institution, Wylie presided with a firm paternal hand. He planted his roots deeply in Bloomington, building a fine house near the college and raising a dozen children with his wife, Elizabeth.
Under his guidance, the college retained its focus on the classical curriculum as enrollments grew steadily. By 1851, the year of Wylie’s untimely death due to a wood chopping accident, there were 88 students and seven faculty members, professing moral and mental philosophy, languages, natural philosophy, mathematics and civil engineering, law, and polite literature.
The university was located a few blocks south of the center of Bloomington. The site reflected the pioneers’ vision of a civilized opening in the wilderness, a space cleared of its native trees and dedicated to the cultivation of the mind and spirit. At first a single schoolhouse sat within the bare rectangle, to be joined later by more substantial academic buildings. In 1854 the main college hall burned, consuming the 1,200 volume library, but it was soon rebuilt with the aid of donations from local citizens and alumni, who organized ‘the Society of the Alumni’ for the purpose of supporting the college.
The leaders who succeeded Wylie were also men of the cloth, expected to exert moral as well as intellectual authority. These preacher-presidents oversaw the development of the university through the Civil War and after, as the academic community in Bloomington grew to a dozen professors and 150 students by the early 1880s. Women became part of this growing student body after 1867, when IU became one of the nation’s first universities to admit women on the same terms as men.
In 1883 another disastrous fire destroyed Science Hall, a substantial structure built a decade earlier. It contained not only valuable scientific apparatus but also the 12,000 volume library, university records, and faculty papers.
Next: New Beginnings
