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A comprehensive regional university today, the University of North Alabama traces its beginnings to the first half of the 19th century, when the Methodist Episcopal Church sought to bring learning and culture to an obscure mountain in a sparsely populated state known as Alabama. From these humble beginnings, the university progressed from a poorly funded church-supported school, to a cash-strapped normal school, to a teachers college and, finally, to the state university it has become. ==LaGrange College== The University of North Alabama first opened its doors as LaGrange College on January 11, 1830, in a mountain hamlet a few miles south of Leighton in eastern Colbert County, Alabama. LaGrange means "The Place" in French. Twenty-one local college trustees were listed in Acts of Alabama, Eleventh Annual Session. Today only a nine-ton stone monument silently guards the ghosts of the once bustling little town of LaGrange and its vibrant college, both of which were sacked and burned by Union troops in 1863. But by then, however, the college, as such, had moved north across the Tennessee River to Florence. The section of Franklin County containing LaGrange Mountain is now Colbert County. LaGrange College, which became Florence Wesleyan University in 1855, is now the University of North Alabama. LaGrange College arose from the idea offered at a November 28, 1826 meeting of the Tennessee Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church to establish a college which would not be "religious or theological." By January 1829, the selection of Lawrence Hill on LaGrange Mountain was made for the site of the school. A year later, LaGrange College opened to students of all denominations in two three-story brick buildings. (This was slightly more than a year before the University of Alabama would open in Tuscaloosa.) Eight days after the opening of LaGrange College, the Alabama Legislature issued a charter for the institution, making it the first state-chartered institution to begin operation in Alabama. Other colleges were in operation, but not chartered by the state. The Rev. Robert Paine was the first president. The North Carolina native was also the professor of moral science and belles lettres and taught geography and mineralogy. He was assisted by two other professors. The first board of trustees had a total of 50 members, including two Native Americans, a Choctaw politician and a Cherokee leader. In 1830, Turner Saunders, a native of Virginia, was the first President of the Board of Trustees. Saunders' mansion c1826 still stands in Lawrence County. Among the many distant trustees was John Coffee of Florence, friend of Andrew Jackson. Among the local trustees was Henry Stuart Foote of Tuscumbia, who would move to Mississippi and defeat Jefferson Davis in the 1850 Governor's race. J.D. Malone, of Limestone County, was the first graduate in 1833. In 1850, a grammar school was added to LaGrange College. (Today, UNA has the only university-owned and operated elementary laboratory school - Kilby Professional Laboratory School - in Alabama.) Among LaGrange's alumni were several generals, Alabama governors Edward A. O'Neal and David P. Lewis, Alabama Supreme Court justice William M. Byrd and U.S. Senator Jeremiah Clemens, who wrote the first American Civil War novel and the first western novel.〔(Jarnigan, Bill. "Facts and Figures about UNA," Office of University Relations, University of North Alabama )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of the University of North Alabama」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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