Founding Meeting in 1850
- When
- May 31, 1850
- Where
- Meeting location unspecified; participants included Chicago businessmen
Nine prominent Chicago businessmen, Methodist leaders, and attorneys met on May 31, 1850, having formed the idea of a university to serve the Northwest Territory.
The group formed the idea of establishing a university to serve the area known as the Northwest Territory from 1787 to 1803. They affiliated the university with the Methodist Episcopal Church but favored a non-sectarian admissions policy, believing Northwestern should serve all people in the newly developing territory by bettering the economy in Evanston. The meeting's location is not specified in the sources; only that the participants included prominent Chicago-based businessmen.
Sources
- Northwestern University Wikipedia, revision of 2026-10-05
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.