The story behind the founding of Colorado College, 150 years ago | Cronin and Loevy

This spring marks the 150th anniversary of the founding of Colorado College in Colorado Springs in 1874. Few are aware that the initial motivation for the founding was to create a memorial to a 14-year-old girl who died of tuberculosis the previous year.

Here is an early account of the founding, written in the flowery and overstated writing style of the time:

“The first organized college in Colorado is the memorial of a beautiful American girl, who lost her life (and her) love of learning. She came as a young consumptive to (Colorado) Territory in the spring of 1873 and died the next autumn at the age of 14.”

“When visiting General (William J.) Palmer’s residence one day and looking at the eagles on the rocks and in the air, she suggested the founding of a school nearby.”

It would be a place “where youth inclined to pulmonary diseases might learn to soar, as light of heart and strong of wing as old Glen Eyrie’s king of birds, whose life among the cliffs and flight above the clouds symbolized her own aspiring hope and faith.”

The young girl was named Florence Haskell. Her family had moved to the cool air and high elevation of Colorado in hopes it might cure her lung ailment.

Soon after the death of Florence Haskell, her father, the Rev. Thomas Nelson Haskell, a Congregational minister and recently a professor at the University of Wisconsin, proposed to the Colorado Conference of the Congregational Church, meeting in Boulder, his daughter’s hopes of starting a college in Colorado.

Haskell specified that the new college would be “open to both sexes and all races.”

At a subsequent meeting of the Conference, in Denver, on Jan. 20, 1874, the group gratefully accepted the offer from Palmer, of Colorado Springs, of 10 acres of land for the college campus, 70 acres of residential lots in the city that could be sold to raise money, and $10,000 cash to get the college started.

In addition, Palmer, a Quaker, had banned the sale of alcohol in his new city, and that made Colorado Springs appear particularly desirable to Rev. Haskell.

On Feb. 9, 1874, a certificate of incorporation for the new college was filed with the Territory of Colorado in Denver. On Feb. 17, the certificate of incorporation was filed in El Paso County, where Colorado Springs had been founded just three years earlier.

A Board of Trustees was appointed. The board was required to have “a majority of Christian men to keep the college evangelical, nonsectarian, and in sympathy with the progress of the age.”

The trustees met at once and named the school Colorado College. Thomas Nelson Haskell set to work soliciting funds and selecting a faculty. Under the direction of the Rev. Jonathan Edwards, the first classes were taught on May 6, 1874, in a building at the northwest corner of East Pikes Peak Avenue and North Tejon Street.

For years, that location was the site of the First National Bank building, then Chase Bank. Today, the offices of The Gazette are nearby.

The date of the first classes, May 6, 1874, has traditionally been recognized as the birthday of Colorado College.

The Gazette made this comment on the opening of Colorado College: “We have secured the location of the college here, and that will be no small aid to the growth of our town, if we go to work and make the best of it. The cooperation of our people is needed to give the enterprise a good start, and that cooperation should be given heartily and ungrudgingly.”

Typical of colleges at that time, Colorado College began with both preparatory and college-level classes. Due to the inadequacy of high school education in those days, many of the incoming students needed to take preparatory classes before they were ready for college level work.

The Gazette reported on May 9, 1874, that “the Preparatory Department of Colorado College was opened Wednesday last, and 20 students have already been enrolled. Most of these are from our town, but it has been signified that several more from other places, in this Territory, may shortly be expected.”

Faculty began to come on board. Professor E.N. Bartlett, formerly of Olivet College, in Olivet, Mich., was hired to teach Latin and Greek. Sanford C. Robinson, an Oberlin College graduate, was to assist in mathematics and physics.

Women served on the faculty from the start. Minna Knapp, of Germany, instructed in German and music. Mary MacKenzie and Emma Bump also were teaching.

By July 18, 1874, Edwards announced that student enrollments were going so well there were students from 10 states in addition to those from the Colorado Territory. Now, 150 years later, Colorado College regularly enrolls students from nearly every state and about two dozen other countries.

Thomas Nelson Haskell was the founder of Colorado College. At every point in the organizing process, he was the “lever” that kept the process going. It was Palmer’s gift of land and money, however, that brought Haskell’s new college to Colorado Springs.

Haskell House, the campus house where students majoring in French live together, is named in honor of Haskell. It is located at the southwest corner of Uintah Street and North Cascade Avenue.

But the inspiration for Colorado College was Florence Haskell, the ailing 14-year-old girl who, in her last days, wished for a college at a healthful high elevation that would provide a place for students with lung diseases to study and learn.