On a cold November day in 1855, about a dozen townspeople gathered around a three-story building on the corner of Davis and Hinman streets to commemorate the first official day of classes for a little-known school on the American frontier. Northwestern University boasted two faculty members and a first-day attendance of four students.

This afternoon, about a dozen people will gather for a commemorative lunch at that same spot, in the shadow of Homecoming festivities last weekend that drew thousands of students, faculty, alumni and others to celebrate the 150th anniversary of that historic day.

The actual anniversary is Saturday, and nothing special is planned for it, said University Archivist Patrick Quinn. He, along with others who were involved in planning NU’s 2001 sesquicentennial celebration of the university’s 1851 founding, plans to attend the small luncheon at the Davis Street Fishmarket. This is where Old College, NU’s first building, once stood.

The first day of classes for NU in 1855 was an equally low-key affair, Quinn said.

“It was never reported in any Chicago papers,” he said. “The accounts we have were written much later. There was no impressive ceremony, just a Methodist minister saying the greetings. Among those who assembled were a town eccentric, a hotel owner and three founders of the university.”

NU was officially founded in 1851, but construction of Old College among the oak groves and swamps north of Chicago wasn’t complete until Nov. 1, 1855, Quinn said. At the time, NU owned all the land in what would become Evanston, which it rented to locals to generate revenue.

Tuition was $45 per year for the first NU students, which wasn’t much even back then, Quinn said. There was no university housing for the students, who had to board with local residents.

After the first day of classes on Nov. 5, six more students showed up, and five of those 10 went on to become the first graduating class in 1859. Two of those graduates eventually commanded black regiments in the Union Army during the Civil War, which started two years later.

The first two faculty members, a Greek language and literature professor and a mathematics professor, were representative of the curriculum NU taught in those days, Quinn said. All freshmen had to take the same classes: Greek, Latin, algebra and history. Elocution, physics and natural history were added for older students.

Over the decades following its creation, NU was proactive in attracting students, eventually achieving the third-highest enrollment in the nation with about 2,000 students at the turn of the century. Chicago didn’t even have a high school when NU was founded, so the university built its own.

“Ever notice anything strange about Fisk Hall?” Quinn said. “It used to be the high school, a prep school. Fisk Auditorium was just a normal high school auditorium.”

NU first admitted women in 1869. Black students were admitted in the 1880s, although they were not allowed to live in campus housing until the 1950s.

The university grew quickly, but it did not gain a strong academic reputation until the 1930s, Quinn said. Although the school has always been Northwestern, he said, many early publications referred to it as “North-Western” or “North Western” out of unfamiliarity.

After World War II, enrollment in state schools skyrocketed into the tens of thousands, making NU a mid-sized school by comparison.

The Old College building, where it all started, was moved to where Fisk Hall is today, and then again to where the McCormick Tribune Center now stands. In 1973, it was struck by lightning, which set off the sprinkler system and damaged it beyond repair.

Today, NU has an enrollment of more than 13,000 undergraduate and graduate students, about 2,500 full-time faculty and an academic reputation among the top schools in the nation. Its official school colors have changed from black and gold, to purple and gold, to just purple. The university has come a long way from that quiet opening ceremony in 1855, Quinn said.

“It was a very nondescript event,” he said. “Obviously, very few people had any idea – they couldn’t have had any idea – of what was going to happen.”

Reach Nitesh Srivastava at [email protected].