Lawrence University

TIME AND TRADITIONS: 1840s

Amos Lawrence

1847 O'er the Fox

Prior to the statehood of Wisconsin, the first member of the Lawrence administration and Appleton's first permanent resident, the Reverend William Harkness Sampson, arrives in a dugout canoe and selects a wooded bluff above the Fox River as the site for Lawrence University.
Amos Lawrence, a Boston merchant and father of the university, had commissioned Sampson and the Reverend Henry R. Colman to establish a frontier school, pledging $10,000 to endow the institution on the condition that Methodists, represented by Sampson and Colman, match his initial gift. Lawrence visits the school named in his honor in 1857.

Established, according to a fund-raising brochure, to afford "gratuitous advantage to Germans and Indians of both sexes," the school is one of the country's oldest coeducational institution.

1849 Doors open

In November 1849, Lawrence University, located at the present site of Appleton's YMCA, opens its doors to 35 students, among them 13 Oneida Indians, who are taught by five teachers.

Lawrence Institute

View of College Avenue between Morrison and Oneida streets.

On to the 1850s

Milwaukee-Downer in the 1840s

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