Oakland College was founded by the Presbyterians in Claiborne County, Mississippi, in order to provide quality college and theological education for men who were already living here on the frontier.
Jeremiah Chamberlain was the founder and first President of the College. He was well educated himself, graduating from Dickinson College in 1814 and from Princeton Seminary in 1817. He had started a state college in Louisiana, before moving to Mississippi to found Oakland College. He labored faithfully to educate the young men of Southwest Mississippi until he was murdered in 1851.
His murder had to do with the passions that led up to the American Civil War. In 1851, Mississippi was in the middle of a race for governor, and one of the main issues was whether Mississippi should secede from the union. On September 1 and 2, people all over the state voted for delegates to a convention that would decide whether or not Mississippi would leave the United States, and the pro-union side won, but only got 57% of the vote.
In the middle of this campaign, a man named George Briscoe had written a newspaper article, accusing Dr. Chamberlain of expelling a student from Oakland College for making a pro-secession speech. Chamberlain denied this, pointing out in another newspaper article that the student was still enrolled in the college. Briscoe was humiliated, having been shown to be a liar in the most public way. So, on September 5, 1851, he got drunk, drove up to Dr. Chamberlain’s house on the college campus, and beat him and stabbed him to death.
After Dr. Chamberlain’s death, Oakland College continued its mission. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, most of the students went off to war, and the college closed. It reopened in the Fall of 1865. A Scottish professor named Dr. Joseph Calvin gathered faculty and students around him, and by the Fall of 1866, the student body was up to 75. But Dr. Calvin died suddenly in February of 1867, and the college never really recovered. It struggled on for a few more years, but on June 29, 1871, Oakland College closed its doors forever. The Presbyterian Church sold the college campus to the State of Mississippi, which used it to establish Alcorn College, now Alcorn State University.
