The WVU football team opened another college football season on Saturday.Thousands of fans made their way into the stadium for the game.
But did you know that the first ever class of undergrads in WVU history could fit inside a single car?
It was on this date, that the West Virginia Agricultural College, renamed West Virginia University a year later, began its first term, on September 2, 1867. Tuition for that first class was $8 for 13 weeks. Room and board would run you $3.50 per week.
There were just two buildings on campus when the first term started in 1867. The buildings that are synonymous with WVU now, were still decades away. The WVU Mountainlair wouldn’t exist for another century; it first opened its doors to serve students in 1968.
There were 118 other students in that first class, but they weren’t ready for college level work, that group was in a different division, more like a high school class, rather than anything resembling higher education.
And don’t even think about finding a date among your new classmates. The first student body at WVU was all male. Women were not admitted to the University until 1889. In fact, once WVU did admit women, they had dress codes and curfews until 1973. That would have been rough on the Instagram influencers.
Not that you would time for such things. For nearly thirty years after the school was established until 1895, WVU students were required to go to church every Sunday and attend chapel services every morning.
We hear a lot today about dorm culture. The average family spends on average $598 on dorm items, according to a recent poll. But there were no modern amenities for that first WVU class two years after the end of the Civil War; no central heat, no electricity and no running water in the living quarters.
The first of that undergrad class in 1867 to get his degree was Marmaduke H. Dent of Granville in Mon County. And there were a lot of interesting things about him, in addition to his first name; Marmaduke.
Dent volunteered for the 6th West Virginia Cavalry in 1864 when he was just 15 years old. He got his WVU degree in 1870, his advanced degree three years later and became the first president of its alumni association.
Dent moved to Grafton and was elected to the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals in 1892 and served for more than a decade. In 1898, Dent wrote the Court’s opinion in the ruling that black students were entitled to the same length of a school term as white students and that black teachers were entitled to the same pay.
Marmaduke Dent’s son would also go on to become a circuit judge and his granddaughter represented Lewis County in the House of Delegates.
Dent created a legacy that he could have hardly imagined, the first day he sat down in that tiny Morgantown classroom as part of the first ever class of undergrads at WVU, that began their first term on this date, September 2nd, 1867.
I’ll talk to you later today in MetroNews Hotline on many of these same stations beginning at 3:06.