George Washington willed shares to found a university; they became worthless
George Washington spent his career urging Congress to build a national university in the capital, and when he died in 1799 he left shares in the Potomac Company to fund it. The shares lost their value and never paid for any school. A Baptist minister had to raise the money instead, two decades later.
Washington imagined a university in the heart of the new capital that would gather the most promising students from across the country. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison echoed the wish, but it was the Baptist missionary Luther Rice who made it happen, persuading benefactors such as Monroe, John Quincy Adams and Calhoun to contribute. On February 9, 1821, President Monroe signed the congressional charter creating the non-denominational Columbian College, the first university founded under the District of Columbia's jurisdiction. Its first large building stood on College Hill, today Meridian Hill.
The Civil War split its community. Most students were Southerners, and many left in 1861 to fight for the Confederacy. One anatomy professor became Jefferson Davis's physician, while another faculty doctor, Robert King Stone, stayed in Washington to attend Abraham Lincoln, and the college briefly served as a Union army camp. In 1904 the school took George Washington's name, and in 1912 it moved its main operations to Foggy Bottom, a few blocks from the White House.
Science had its moment there too. Across the 1930s and 1940s the cosmologist George Gamow worked out Big Bang theory on campus, and on January 26, 1939, Niels Bohr announced at a physics conference on campus that Otto Hahn had split the atom. During the Vietnam War, Thurston Hall, a dormitory for 1,116 students three blocks from the White House, became a staging ground for anti-war protests.
Today about 11,500 undergraduates and 15,000 graduate students attend, and the university is a leading supplier of diplomats, with over 1,100 alumni active in the Foreign Service. Past trustees include John Quincy Adams, Ulysses S. Grant and Alexander Graham Bell. In 2022 it retired its Colonials nickname; its teams now play as the Revolutionaries.
Source: George Washington University
