Centenary College

About this property

The original campus of Centenary College of Louisiana is located along College Street in Jackson, Louisiana. It is operated and preserved as a museum by the Louisiana Office of State Parks as the Centenary State Historic Site, offering educational interpretive programs and guided tours. In 1825, the Louisiana Legislature chartered four public colleges. One of these was the College of Louisiana at Jackson, a small town on the border of East and West Feliciana Parishes. Despite the tireless efforts of the trustees to maintain a college of the finest repute, in its 20-year history, the college only produced 24 graduates. Its main contributions to the future of the campus were the East and West Wing dormitories, two impressive brick barracks-style structures built between 1832 and 1837. One of the key figures in the College of Louisiana was William King, who ran its preparatory school, Mathews Academy. When the college suffered from low enrollment, King agreed to combine the two schools, though doing so was not enough to save the college from sale two years later. King later became famous for his disdain of slavery and for founding the Elgin settlement in Ontario, a home for escaped slaves who had reached Canada via the Underground Railroad. Several institutions of higher learning sprouted in and around Jackson in the autumn of 1845, somewhat as a result of Centenary College of Louisiana's opening at that time. (Centenary College, a Methodist church-affiliated institution, was founded in Mississippi in 1839; then it relocated to Louisiana.) The Episcopal women's academy, the Southern Institute for Young Ladies, opened the year before, under the direction of Rev. William B. Lacey—who had been a president of the College of Louisiana. The school continued in operation until 1860. The Feliciana Female Collegiate Institute opened in 1847, led by the Methodist Episcopal Rev. Benjamin Jones and his wife. It also continued until the outbreak of the American Civil War. The greatest event of the social calendar in antebellum Jackson was Centenary's annual commencement. The small town was pushed to its limits at that time, as dignitaries from across the state and region crowded its hotels and private homes for the occasion. More people than usual were in attendance for the 1856 commencement, as it included the ceremony of placing the cornerstone for the college's new Centre Building. Included in this building were all offices, classrooms, laboratories, debate halls, etc. The building also featured a 3,000-volume library, and an auditorium which seated between two and three thousand. When completed, the structure dwarfed the dormitories upon either side (pictured).

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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