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Your cynicism serves you well. Because arguably the University of Pittsburgh, that bastion of truth, is built on a foundation of lies.
The 1787 date reflects the founding of the Pittsburgh Academy, which Pitt historian Robert Alberts calls Pitt’s “grandfather.” The school was chartered by the legislature in 1787, in an act noting that every “school or college yet established is greatly distant from the country west of the Allegheny Mountains.”
But despite the title of Alberts’ book, Pitt: The Story of the University of Pittsburgh 1787-1987, the book itself presents evidence putting the 1787 date in question. For starters, “Although the Academy’s charter was granted [in] 1787 … formal instruction did not begin for two years,” Alberts admits. A principal wasn’t hired until March 1789, when the curriculum consisted of “the Learned Languages, English, and the Mathematicks.”
More importantly, the Academy was more like a grade school than a college. Public schools as such didn’t exist here back then; parents had to pay for even elementary education. And that’s largely what the Academy provided. Newspaper accounts of an 1804 assembly noted that “Many of the boys were not more than twelve years of age, some under ten.” (And the students were all male — although one “Monsieur Herbemont” was willing to teach French to young women in the evening …)
Education, like much else in Pittsburgh back then, was rustic. In her own 1937 history of Pitt, Agnes Starrett writes that some of the students “worked for local merchants or picked fruit in the orchards of apple and pear trees … on the bank of the Allegheny.” As for the building itself, details about the Academy are scarce, but as Starrett writes, in those days the students’ desks were “so fastened to the wall … that they could be dropped down at night when the school room was used … for the schoolmaster’s bedroom.” Sooner or later, everyone slept in class.
But by the 1810s, Alberts writes, it was increasingly clear that “Pittsburgh had no true college.” Locals “lamented that young people had to travel several hundred miles to the east to receive a higher education, thus falling prey to all the moral dangers of living far from home in a strange city.” And that, of course, did nothing for business along Carson Street. So city leaders again petitioned the state, and in 1819 Harrisburg granted a charter to establish the Western University of Pennsylvania. The new school used Pittsburgh Academy’s buildings and other assets, and apparently other teaching programs were folded into the new school as well.
WUP’s faculty wasn’t hired until 1822, but the new school was much more like a college as we know it today. WUP offered a seven-year-long course, divided into a “classical” program and a “collegiate” program. (Tuition was set at $25 and $30 per year, respectively.) There were no freshmen or seniors — students were divided into classes ranging from “hyposophs” to “pleiosophs” — but they studied subjects ranging from Cicero to chemistry, Xenophon to geology.
“Whether anyone ever graduated with all these things in his head does not matter,” notes Starrett, echoing a thought that must have occurred to a few students. What mattered was that the school “had set up an earnest and scholarly atmosphere.”
All in all, then, the university’s real birthdate was probably 1819, when it was chartered as a university.
Oh, and that business about the log cabin? Also PR, right down to the replica cabin in the Cathedral of Learning’s shadow. Pitt’s Web site declares that “this restored log cabin symbolizes Pitt’s humble origins,” and that it was “[m]oved to the Pittsburgh campus” to celebrate the school’s bicentennial. But Alberts casts doubt about those origins: “The story that the first school building was a log house … may be true,” he writes. “[B]ut there is no direct evidence to support [it].”
In any case, Pittsburgh Academy was certainly housed in a brick structure within the following decade. From the outset, classes at Pitt were taught behind a façade of brick. And, apparently, of PR spin.
This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2007.
While what you write in your answer is factual, your insinuation that Pitt’s early history is a foundation of lies is misleading, if not outright untrue. As you noted, a charter was awarded in 1787 for creation of the Pittsburgh Academy. This charter date is, compared to events used to establish founding dates by other colleges and universities, a conservative and documented date of establishment. If you’d like an example of a less conservative one, compare it to the multiple founding dates used by the University of Pennsylvania (originally named, you guessed it, Philadelphia Academy) throughout its history. Their current officially stated 1740 founding date points to the construction of a building that Penn eventually acquired, but was meant for a seminary that never opened. This is quite a stretch compared to Pitt’s founding date, as classes at Philadelphia Academy did not begin until 1751 and it was not actually chartered until 1755. Throughout its history, Pittsburgh Academy/Western University/Univ of Pitt has consistently referred to 1787 as its founding year. However, there is tantalizing evidence that school(s), non-chartered but perhaps a forerunner of Pittsburgh Academy, could have been operating prior to the 1787 charter date (and as early as 1760)…this according to both Starrett and the “The history of Pittsburgh : its rise and progress” by Sarah H. Killikelly (1906). It could be argued that this information could be used in a manner similar to Penn’s justification of their establishment date, but Pitt does not attempt such liberties (and supporting documentation is shaky due to fires which destroyed most of Pitt’s early records).
As noted above, Pittsburgh Academy was a preparatory school, teaching the “rudiments of the ‘sacred six’ of the Scottish universities (founder Hugh Henry Brackenridge was Scottish). This is not unusual as many universities and colleges started as such and even maintained preparatory schools (as Pitt did following the 1819 charter alteration). Similar to Pitt, Penn State started as Farmers’ High School of Pennsylvania in 1855 (the founding date they list). However, Pittsburgh Academy’s 1787 charter is still the backbone of the one under which Pitt operates today. In 1819, the original 1787 charter was modified to turn Pittsburgh Academy into the Western University of Pennsylvania. The charter was again modified in 1908 when its name was changed from to the University of Pittsburgh, and modified once more in 1966 when Pitt became part of the Commonwealth System of Higher Education. Bottom line, as an educational entity, Pitt can trace its founding back along one continuously operating charter since it was granted by the state assembly on February 28th, 1787.
Doubt about the tradition of Pitt’s log cabin origins can be blamed on the fires of 1845 and 1849 that wiped out most of downtown Pittsburgh. For this reason, very few records about Pitt’s early days exist. This is why no one has definitive proof about a log cabin. According to Starrett, a gathering of individuals discussing the need for a new school, which was to become Pitt Academy, occurred in a log house near the Point (this meeting was known to take place but the records from the meeting were lost). In fact, Starrett goes on to state that there is “plenty of evidence that classes were held in a log building, even before the charter was granted”. Most structures in 1787 Pittsburgh, then the frontier of America, were wooden structures or log cabins (and it appears other schools in the area operated out of log cabins…W&J’s first building was one), it is a good conjecture this was also the case for Pitt. It is true though, that by 1790s, a two-story, three-room, brick building was erected for Pitt Academy on the south side of Third Street and Cherry Alley. It is also known, that the school owned both its brick building and a log house next to it that served as the home to its principal (this also according to Starrett). However, it is impossible to definitively say that Pitt first operated out of log cabin unless unlikely new documents/letters from the period are found, but it is an excellent conjecture that it began life in a log cabin, or at least it can be inferred that Pitt Academy had an early log building in its possession. Even if this story is factually inaccurate, it has at least been a traditional tale told within the university for over 100 years, and there is no doubt Pitt’s log cabin at least represents the era of Pitt’s founding (if not the actual 1st meeting in a log cabin to discuss its creation). (By the way, the log cabin put on Pitt’s campus in 1987 to celebrate Pitt’s bicentennial is a restored cabin from Yatesborough, Pa. that was purchased at an auction for $1,000 by Charles Fagan III, who donated it to the University).
By the way, for anyone researching the early history of Pittsburgh or Pitt, Starrett’s work from 1937 is much more authoritative and well researched on Pitt’s early history than Albert’s 1987 book. In fact, while Albert’s work is well done and a great source of information for information on Pitt in the 20th Century, I’ve found some factual errors in Albert’s book. For instance, his list of Pitt Academy principals is wrong.
So to answer the question more fairly, I’m sorry, but there is no corporate lie on that plaque. That plaque does indeed mark the general original location of Pitt. The best guess, from the best historical sources available, suggest Pitt probably started in a log structure. And, compared to establishment dates employed by other institutions of higher learning, the 1787 founding date is legitimate, definitive, and actually conservative.