Stewart Memorial Library - Coe College

The Coe College archive contains a wide variety of content, including yearbooks from 1903 to 2007 and newspapers from 1899 to 2013.

Coe College claims the shortest name of any American institution of higher education, but the school has actually carried five titles throughout its history.

When the Rev. Williston Jones founded the college in 1851, he called it The School for the Prophets. Cedar Rapids' first resident minister opened the parlor of his home to a group of young men with the goal of educating them for the ministry to serve churches in the Midwest. Two years later, while Jones was canvassing churches in the East for money to send three of his students to Eastern seminaries, a Catskills farmer named Daniel Coe stepped forward with a pledge of $1,500 and urged Jones to start his own college in the frontier town of Cedar Rapids.

Legend has it that the $1,500 raised by Coe was brought from New York West, sewed into the petticoat of a lady visitor traveling by stagecoach to Iowa. Coe gave this generous gift stipulating that the proposed institute should be "made available for the education of females as well as males." Accordingly, Coe was coeducational from its founding.

With Jones' blessing, the Cedar Rapids Collegiate Institute was incorporated in 1853 by a group of Cedar Rapids leaders chaired by Judge George Greene. They used Daniel Coe's money to purchase two downtown lots for the school and 80 acres of farmland on what was then the edge of town. The farm would evolve into today's campus.

In 1868, the trustees renamed the school Parsons Seminary in a failed attempt to secure the Lewis Parsons estate. After severe financial difficulties, the institution was re-established in 1875 in honor of its original benefactor, the Coe Collegiate Institute.

T.M. Sinclair, the founder of the Sinclair Meat Packing Company, played the key financial role in the final step toward the firm establishment of Coe College. Sinclair liquidated all the debt from Parsons Seminary and the Cedar Rapids Collegiate Institute. The Sinclair gift made it practical for the property of the Coe Collegiate Institute - including the original land paid for by Daniel Coe - to be transferred to Coe College with the Iowa Presbyterian Synod to assume major responsibility for the institution.

Coe College has operated continuously since its incorporation on Feb. 2, 1881. From the beginning, the college was committed to intellectual excellence, and it has continued in this tradition ever since.

The compact campus on the east edge of Cedar Rapids grew with many building projects in its early years, including Old Main (1868), Williston Hall (1881), Marshall Hall (1900), the first gymnasium (1904), and the first T.M. Sinclair Memorial Chapel (1911).

In 1919 Western Leander Clark merged with Coe College, bringing a $200,000 endowment, alumni, faculty, and students. Western College was originally located in a small community between Ely and Shueyville. The school was founded in 1857, it was the first college west of the Mississippi built by the United Brethren in Christ, hence the name Western College. The college was co-educational from the start.

The land around the college was bought by a group of immigrants who shared a different religion and set of values than the founders of the school. Without community support, the college encountered financial difficulties. In 1881 the college moved to Toledo, IA, where the residents pledged $20,000 in support. Financial difficulties continued. In 1906 the college was renamed after a local benefactor, Leander Clark. Despite this, the financial burden became too much, and the college went bankrupt. (If you would like to learn more about Western College, history is available for check-out, "Western, Leander-Clark College, 1856-1911," by Henry W. Ward, at the Stewart Memorial Library on Coe Campus. You may also visit the archives to view Western Leander Clark College's collection, which contains source material from the college's administration.)

In 1907, Coe earned accreditation from the North Central Association of Colleges and Universities. Over the decades, Coe's reputation as a superior liberal arts college has grown. One recognition of this came in 1949 when Coe was granted a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, a distinction reserved for fewer than five percent of all American colleges and universities.