Campuses

Druid Hills Campus

It was Asa Candler, the founder of The Coca-Cola Company and brother to former Emory President Warren Candler, who helped the church decide that the new Emory University should be built in Atlanta. Writing to the Educational Commission of the Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17, 1914, Asa Candler offered "the sum of one million dollars" and a subsequent gift of seventy-two acres of land. With such munificence placed at its disposal, the commission quickly made up its mind, and the Emory College trustees agreed to move the college from Oxford, Georgia, to Atlanta as the liberal arts core of the University.

At that time those seventy-two acres, about six miles northeast of downtown Atlanta, lay in pasture and woods at the edge of Druid Hills, a park-like residential area laid out by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, the designer of New York City’s Central Park. Within three months of Asa Candler's letter, in September 1914, the first unit of the University—the School of Theology—began classes in downtown Atlanta. Within a year marble buildings were under construction out in Druid Hills, and within four years—by September 1919—Emory College had joined the schools of theology, law, medicine, business, and graduate studies at the University’s muddy new campus. In time schools of nursing and dentistry would join the family, although dentistry would last only until 1990, to be replaced by public health.

Perhaps no two persons have had quite the impact on Emory that the brothers Asa and Warren Candler had – the latter serving for president of the College at Oxford for ten years and then as chancellor of the University after its move to Atlanta until 1920; the former as the University’s greatest philanthropist in the first half of the twentieth century. If there were a contest, the only other competitors would be Robert and George Woodruff.

One day in the last decade of the twentieth century, an anonymous caller informed Emory police that a bomb would go off "in the Woodruff Building." The caller's unfortunate imprecision emptied six buildings—all named for Robert or George Woodruff or some other member of their family.

Gary S. Hauk, ’91 Ph.D., Vice President and Deputy to the President