The Late College of William and Mary.

The College of William and Mary divides with Harvard the claim of antiquity on this continent. Seventeen days before the days of John Harvard, in 1619, money was raised and land appropriated for a college, when a massacre by the Indians prevented its establishment.

But besides being the first American college planned by British Colonists, (it was in fact the first planned by British Colonists in any part of the world), it was the first to receive a Royal Charter, while in its actual establishment it yields to Harvard alone.

Alone among American institutions of learning, did it enjoy the privilege of electing a representative to the state legislature. The period of study as at Cambridge and Oxford covered 3 years. The first college building was planned by Sir Christopher Owen the architect of St. Pauls. Five years after the first commencement exercises held at the beginning of the last century, the building, with the library and physical apparatus, was destroyed by fire, at a time when the colonial legislature was holding its sessions in its walls, curiously co-incident with the fate that befell Harvard Hall in 1764. Unfortunate in this and other occurrences (it was burned three times) in its unhappy situation during the wars of the Revolution and the Rebellion, in both of which it suffered, and crippled in its finances by injudicious investments, it has at last succumbed.

R.