Campuses

Oxford Campus

Emory's history…begins with a meeting of the Georgia Methodist Conference, held in Washington, Georgia, in 1834, at which the president of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia solicited support for his institution. The Conference was ready to vote its patronage, when...a delegate rose in opposition, declaring the Georgia Methodists should have their own college. Although the plea was…disregarded at the moment, within the year plans were made to establish a manual labor school at Covington. The school opened in March, 1835.

Although the manual labor school was in financial straits, the school's chief advocate, Ignatius Alphonso Few, was projecting the establishment of a college in the same location. With the consent of the Conference, and after obtaining a charter from the Georgia legislature, a college town was laid out in the woods near Covington and named Oxford for the university of Charles Wesley, the founder of Methodism. The college was named for Bishop John Emory of Maryland, who had presided at the Washington Conference, and who had been killed in a carriage accident in 1835. With Few as president, classes began on September 17, 1838.

In 1929, the campus at Oxford became home to the new Junior College at Oxford (now Oxford College of Emory University).            

Sources

English, Thomas H.  Emory University 1915-1965:  A Semicentennial  History, p. 3.

Hauk, Gary S.  A Legacy of Heart and Mind: Emory Since 1836, pp 69-70.