Linfield University

Linfield University is a private liberal arts college with campuses in McMinnville, and Portland, Oregon. Linfield Wildcats athletics participate in the NCAA Division III Northwest Conference. Linfield reported a total of 1,755 students after the fall 2022 census date. The institution officially changed its name from Linfield College to Linfield University, effective July 1, 2020. History Linfield traces its history back to the earliest days of Oregon Territory, when pioneer Baptists in Oregon City created the Oregon Baptist Educational Society in 1848. This society was organized to establish a Baptist school in the region, which began as Oregon City College in 1849. In 1855, Sebastian C. Adams began to agitate for a school in McMinnville. Adams and his associates were members of the Christian Church, and so the school became a Christian School. To begin, of property were donated by W. T. Newby and a group was formed to establish the school. The group included William Dawson, James McBride, Newby, and Adams, and they bore the major part of the expenses of starting the school. These men built a building and convinced Adams, who was a teacher, to operate the school. After about a year and a half and because of the difficulty of running the school alone and funding problems, Adams suggested that the school be turned over to the Baptists who were attempting to start up the West Union Institute that had been chartered in 1858 by the Oregon Territorial Legislature. The Adams group imposed the condition that the Baptists keep at least one professor employed continuously in the college department. Other accounts indicate that the Baptist group purchased the land in 1857 in order to start their school. The Oregon Territorial Legislature chartered the Baptist College at McMinnville in 1858. The school later became McMinnville College in 1898. In 1922, the name was changed to Linfield College in memory of a Baptist minister, the Rev. George Fisher Linfield whose widow, Frances Eleanor Ross Linfield, gave a substantial donation to the college to promote Christian education and as a memorial to her late husband. Mrs. Linfield served as Dean of Women from 1921 to 1928, and sat on the Board of Directors from 1922 to her death in 1940. Her gift included real estate in Spokane, Washington, valued at $250,000 (a sum worth nearly $4 million in 2020). In his 1938 book, Bricks Without Straw: The Story of Linfield College, Professor Jonas A.