"Queen's College at Kingston"

Queen's Founder Rev. Dr. Thomas Liddell.

Queen's University was established on 16 October 1841 by a royal charter issued by Queen Victoria. The document was granted after years of effort by the Presbyterians of Upper Canada to found a college for the education of ministers in the growing colony. Queen's was given a governing structure built around a Board of Trustees, a Principal, and a Senate. Classes began on 7 March 1842, when "Queen's College at Kingston" opened in a small wood-frame house on the edge of the city with two professors and 13 students.

For its first 11 years the school had no home. It moved from house to house in Kingston, finally settling in Summerhill, a spacious limestone residence which still stands at the heart of the main campus. Financial support came at first from the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, the Canadian government, and private citizens. But this support was meagre and barely kept the college afloat. In 1867 and 1868 the college faced ruin when the government withdrew its funding and the commercial bank collapsed, a disaster which cost Queen's two-thirds of its endowment. Principal William Snodgrass and other dedicated officials narrowly rescued the college with a desperate fundraising campaign across Canada.

Yet Queen's future remained insecure. As late as the mid-1880s there was talk within university circles that Queen's should leave Kingston and merge with the University of Toronto as the only means of avoiding financial failure. However, Queen's senior officials were determined to stay and build on the roots the college had put down and the progress it had begun to achieve in Kingston. It had added the Faculty of Medicine in 1854 and had taken over the Kingston observatory in 1861. In 1869, Queen's became the first university west of the Maritimes to admit women to classes. And by the mid-1870s enrolment had grown from 15 to more than 100 students.

But it was not until the principalship of the Rev. George Munro Grant (1877-1902) that Queen's achieved a position as one of Canada's premier universities. The first of Queen's Canadian-born principals, Grant was an idealistic and forceful man, determined to build the college into a national institution. He was deeply religious and nationalistic and worked to produce graduates who would build the growing country in a spirit of dedicated service rather than material gain. Under his leadership, Queen's grew rapidly in size and prestige. By the end of his 25-year term the college had more than tripled its size, gained a measure of financial security, and charted a course towards greater academic diversity. In 1893 Queen's established the Ontario School of Mining and Agriculture, forerunner of today's Queen's Faculty of Applied Science. A graduate studies program was launched in 1889. And in the 1880s it pioneered correspondence education in North America.

Principal Grant died in 1902 and was succeeded by the Rev Daniel Miner Gordon. No one could replace Grant entirely, but the college continued to grow under Gordon's direction. The most important development in Gordon's term came in 1912, when Queen's separated from the Presbyterian Church – a move which brought it more in touch with an increasingly secular age. It was then that the college officially changed its name to "Queen's University at Kingston." Gordon retired because of failing health in 1916, two years into World War I.

Wikipedia

'Before Queen's moved to its present campus in 1853, it occupied a variety of rented houses around Kingston – all of which, remarkably, still stand. Queen's first home was a small wood-frame house at 67 Colborne Street, where two professors and 13 students met for the university's first classes on 7 March 1842. However, Queen's stayed in this cramped building for just six months. In the fall of 1842 the professors and students moved to rented quarters at 320 Princess Street, a stone building opposite St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, the meeting place of Queen's first trustees. But this building soon proved too small as well, and, in 1844, Queen's shifted to two stone houses at 203-205 William Street. Two more adjoining houses were added in 1847, one as a boarding house for students and the other for classrooms. But university officials always regarded these modest buildings on William Street as temporary and kept up a search for a spacious and "sightly edifice" that would match their grand ambitions for Queen's. They found their answer when Anglican Archdeacon George Okill Stuart decided to sell Summerhill, his elegant villa opposite Kingston General Hospital. Queen's trustees bought the building and its seven acres of property in 1853, and thus settled Queen's on its present campus.'

Queen's Encyclopedia