The history of Georgetown University spans nearly 400 years, from the early European settlement of America to the present day. Georgetown University has grown with both its city, Washington, D.C., and the United States, each of which date their founding to the period from 1788 to 1790. Georgetown's origins are in the establishment of the Maryland colony in the seventeenth century. Bishop John Carroll established the school at its present location by the Potomac River after the American Revolution allowed for free religious practice.
The role of the Society of Jesus in the school's operation has evolved from that of founders and financiers to faculty and advisers. Their focus on liberal studies and religious pluralism have helped to give the school its identity. Georgetown was also affected by its times, including the American Civil War, which disrupted the growing school and significantly changed its student body. University presidents like Patrick Francis Healy modernized the institution into an active research university with several graduate and undergraduate schools, and oversaw the expansion of educational opportunities on campus, around the city, and abroad.
Founding
The history of Georgetown University traces back to two formative events, in 1634 and 1789. Until 1851, the school used 1788, the start of construction on the Old South building, as its founding date. In that year a copy-edit in the college catalog began mislabeling the construction as beginning in 1789. This was discovered in preparation for the centennial celebration in 1889, at which point, rather than correct the annual, the date of Georgetown's foundation was fixed to the date January 23, 1789.
First establishments On November 22, 1633 Jesuits Andrew White, John Altham Gravenor, and Thomas Gervase set sail on The Ark for English America under the leadership and financing of the Lord Baltimore, Leonard Calvert. Their landing on March 25, 1634, on St. Clement's Island marks the birth of the Maryland colony, this anniversary now celebrated as Maryland Day. These Jesuits were joined in 1637 by Thomas Copley and Ferdinand Poulton, and together established a missionary fort next to a series of native dwellings near St. Mary's City on land purchased from the local Yaocomico tribe, which they paid for with hatchets, axes, hoes, and cloth.
Inquiring about patronage for a school at this site, Poulton wrote to Vincenzo Carafa, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus in Rome under Pope Urban VIII, who on September 15, 1640, approved the institution of a school in principle. That year they moved to a permanent building at Calverton Manor on in the Wicomico River. This early establishment was burnt in 1645 as part of the English Civil War, and the remaining Jesuits were brought to trial by the Crown. The new Protestant administration had their school outlawed, though it was functioning by 1648, when Thomas Copley managed to return there.
Newtown Manor, also known as "Bretton's Neck", near modern-day Leonardtown, Maryland, become available to the Jesuits in 1677. This house served as the Jesuit schoolhouse until 1704 when its existence was alerted to the colonial authorities. The school afterward conducted itself periodically and in secrecy at the new Jesuit colony of Bohemia Manor. Bishop John Carroll attended this school from 1745 until 1748. Bicentennial Exhibit Carroll then left for studies in Europe. He joined the Jesuits in 1753, and was ordained in 1769, but in 1774 Pope Clement XIV ordered the suppression of the Jesuit order, forcing Carroll to return to Maryland. This put Carroll in the right place at the right time, when the American Revolution pushed out the British administration, opening up new possibilities for scholastic expansion.
Georgetown Heights
After returning in 1774 to live on the Rock Creek in Maryland, Carroll established Saint John the Evangelist Church, in Silver Spring, Maryland. In 1776, his cousin, Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, invited John to join him, Samuel Chase, and Benjamin Franklin in traveling to Quebec and attempt to persuade the French Canadian population to join the revolution. The mission was unsuccessful, but John Carroll's association with Benjamin Franklin proved useful. In 1784, Franklin, as ambassador to France, recommended Carroll to the papal nuncio in Paris as the head of the Catholic Church in America, and on June 9, 1784, Carroll was anointed Superior of Missions in the United States of North America. On November 6, 1789, Carroll's authority was confirmed after being elected by the clergy as the first Bishop of Baltimore.
Beginning in 1783, Carroll convened meetings of area clergy, mostly ex-Jesuits, at Sacred Heart Church at White Marsh Manor, outside Annapolis, Maryland. This body, known as the General Chapters, resolved on November 13, 1786, that "a school be erected for the education of youth" and that the location for the school would be in Georgetown. The site was influenced by Carroll's experience with Jesuit colleges in Europe, which were located in urban centers. Port towns were used by Jesuits because of their missionary focus. By March 1787, they formed a fund raising committee, and Carroll solicited formal proposals for an "academy, at George-town, Patowmack-River, Maryland." The District of Columbia's borders wouldn't be defined until the passage and implementation of the Residence Act in 1790.
Georgetown Academy On April 24, 1787, Georgetown landowner John Threlkeld donated a plot of land to Carroll, which was ultimately where he founded Holy Trinity Church. In April 1788, construction began at a larger neighboring plot on Georgetown's first building, later called "Old South", leading Carroll to write "We shall begin the building of our Academy this summer. On this Academy are built all my hopes of permanency and success of our holy religion in the United States." On January 23, 1789, John Carroll, Robert Molyneux and John Ashton completed the purchase from Threlkeld and William Deakins Jr. for "seventy five pounds current money" of the acre and a half on which construction had already started. This land became the core of Georgetown's campus. As a result, the university celebrates this date as its founding.
Carroll had difficulty filling the position of president of the academy, with many candidates declining the job before Robert Plunkett first took the office in 1791, though he only served 18 months. He oversaw the division of the academy into "college", "preparatory", and "elementary", with the youngest starting at age eight. Jean-Edouard de Mondésir became the first teacher in late October 1791, and the first student, William Gaston, was enrolled on November 22, 1791. Bicentennial Exhibit Classes commenced on January 2, 1792, with around 69 students attending in its first year. Georgetown's second building, Old North, which survives to this day, began construction in 1794. At three times the size of Old South, it greatly increased the number of classrooms and sleeping space on campus. Upon the building's completion under President Rev. William Matthews, George Washington visited and spoke from the porch, a position since reserved for U.S. Presidents.
Early growth
In its early years, Georgetown suffered from considerable financial strain, relying on private sources of funding and the limited profits from local plantations had been donated to the Jesuits by wealthy landowners. Some of these included enslaved African-American workers. By September 1792, tuition had to be increased for the first time.
In 1796, Louis William Valentine DuBourg arrived and became president. DuBourg brought with him a collection of books from his own collection and others from St. Mary's Seminary, the Baltimore Society of Saint-Sulpice, and these books formed the nucleus of Georgetown's library. Georgetown Universities Libraries Special Collections On January 1, 1798, DuBourg released the first prospectus to advertise the college abroad, but also drove the school into debt by hiring numerous new faculty, including fencing teachers, and by buying silver and a school piano. The first board of directors organized in 1797, and quickly became unhappy about DuBourg's spending and preference for French faculty, particularly during the Quasi-War. The board forced him to resign in December 1798. Georgetown Universities Libraries Special Collections
Beginning in 1798, Leonard Neale and his brother Francis oversaw the growth of the university as presidents for a combined eleven years. At Carroll's request, Neale was also appointed coadjutor bishop by Pope Pius VI in 1800. In 1799 Neale invited three sisters of the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary to open a monastery at Georgetown. On June 24, 1799, the young Georgetown Visitation Monastery under Mother Teresa Lalor began a Saturday school for young women. This developed into an academy, now Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, in 1802. Leonard Neale served as president of Georgetown until 1806, when he was succeeded by Robert Molyneux, who died in 1808. Leonard Neale's brother, Francis Neale, became president of Georgetown College in 1809.
When the suppression of the Society of Jesus in Maryland ended in 1805, several former Jesuits rejoined, including Leonard Neale. Carroll commenced a series of agreements to ensure Jesuit involvement in the school. Carroll, however, never rejoined the society. In 1806 the school began a novitiate for Jesuit recruits moving from Russia, which had harbored the society during the suppression.
Carroll did not seek civil recognition for Georgetown after the suppression of the international society ended in 1814. Instead of a state charter, he went to the federal government, then directly in charge of the District of Columbia. William Gaston, then a Congressman, sponsored the legislation for a congressional charter, which passed the Thirteenth Congress. Georgetown received the first federal university charter on March 1, 1815, signed into law by President James Madison. This allowed Georgetown to grant academic degrees, and the college's first two recipients, a pair of brothers from New York City named Charles and George Dinnies, were awarded the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1817. Graduate degrees were first awarded in 1821, and other Jesuit schools conferred degrees under Georgetown's charter for many years afterward. In 1833, the Holy See empowered Georgetown to confer degrees in philosophy and theology.
Founder John Carroll died December 3, 1815, at age 80, and in his will he left Georgetown $400.00, which marked the beginning of Georgetown's endowment. In 1830, construction of an infirmary in the new Gervase Building brought the first hospital beds to Georgetown.
In 1838, the Maryland Jesuits sold 272 slaves from a Jesuit-owned tobacco plantation in Maryland to a plantation in Maringouin, Louisiana; a small portion of the funds from that sale were used to repay debts from recent college expansion. Upon completion of the sale, the Maryland Jesuits ended their time as slaveholders. One of the organizers, a former president of the university, Thomas Mulledy was later disciplined in Rome by the Society of Jesus for ignoring their order to keep families of slaves intact in any sale. The slaves were shipped to the Deep South in the domestic slave trade, sold primarily to two sugar cane plantations. Some of the money was used to found two Catholic high schools in New York City and Philadelphia, as the Jesuits believed there was a demand for urban ministry to serve the increasing number of immigrants from Europe, including Catholics from Ireland.Kathryn Brand, "The Jesuits' Slaves", The Georgetown Voice, 8 February 2007, accessed 25 April 2016