Greenville College

Greenville College is located in Greenville, Illinois, a small (population 6,955) southern Illinois city, located 45 miles from St. Louis, Missouri on Interstate 70. The college is a liberal arts four-year school that is affiliated with the Free Methodist Church, a church with an evangelical foundation. Greenville College was founded in 1855 as an all-female Baptist school, Almira College, which was begun by the Rev. John Brown White. White named... more

Greenville College is located in Greenville, Illinois, a small (population 6,955) southern Illinois city, located 45 miles from St. Louis, Missouri on Interstate 70. The college is a liberal arts four-year school that is affiliated with the Free Methodist Church, a church with an evangelical foundation. Greenville College was founded in 1855 as an all-female Baptist school, Almira College, which was begun by the Rev. John Brown White. White named the school after his friend Stephen Morse's wife, Almira Blanchard Morse, who donated the initial $6,000 that allowed the school to open. GC history professor Donald Jordahl has written that Almira College was "one of the earliest extensions westward of an eastern idea favorable toward female education, an early step in the women's suffrage and liberation movement." The school was re-named as Greenville College in 1892, when it was sold to the Central Illinois Conference of the Free Methodist Church and became co-educational. Throughout much... less