For four months in 1783, Princeton's Nassau Hall served as America's capital
Princeton's oldest building has had a dramatic life. British soldiers briefly held Nassau Hall during the 1777 Battle of Princeton before surrendering to George Washington's army. In 1783 the Continental Congress met there, and it was in that hall that Congress heard of the peace treaty with Britain. Fires gutted it twice more.
The College of New Jersey grew out of a church quarrel. In 1741, in the wake of the Great Awakening revival, Philadelphia's Presbyterian synod threw out its New Light faction. Disappointed that Harvard and Yale opposed the revival, and seeing no college between New Haven and Williamsburg, four of them planned a new school. The Anglican governor refused, but acting governor John Hamilton granted a charter on 22 October 1746. Classes began in 1747 in president Jonathan Dickinson's parsonage in Elizabeth; after his death they moved to Aaron Burr Sr.'s parsonage in Newark.
Governor Jonathan Belcher, estranged from his own alma mater Harvard, adopted the young college, issuing a second charter in 1748 and donating his 474-volume library. In 1756 it moved to Princeton, since Newark was judged too near New York. The trustees wanted to name the new hall after Belcher; he refused, and it honoured William III of the House of Orange-Nassau instead.
John Witherspoon, president from 1768 until 1794 and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, made the college a seedbed of revolutionary leadership, though the war left it with a depleted endowment and big repair bills. Student rebellion was a recurring theme: president Samuel Stanhope Smith blamed students for the 1802 fire that destroyed Nassau Hall's interior, and a riot in 1807 helped end his tenure. By the 1820s enrollment had fallen so low that president James Carnahan considered closing; an alumni association led by James Madison raised money to save it. Nassau Hall burned again in 1855.
James McCosh, president from 1868, modernised the curriculum; his era also produced college football's first team to play another school, and the earliest eating club to last. The honour system, allowing exams without proctors, arrived in 1893, and in 1896 the college became Princeton University. Today its endowment of $37.7 billion is the largest per student in the country, and 81 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with it.
Source: Princeton University
