Transylvania University

Transylvania University (often shortened as Transy) is a private university in Lexington, Kentucky, United States. It was founded in 1780 and is Kentucky's oldest university. It offers 46 major programs, as well as dual-degree engineering programs, and is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Its medical program has graduated 8,000 physicians since 1859.

Transylvania's name, meaning "across the woods" in Latin, stems from the university's founding in the heavily forested region of western Virginia known as the Transylvania Colony, which existed between 1775 and 1776 in southern and western Kentucky.

It is the alma mater of two U.S. vice presidents, two U.S. Supreme Court justices, 50 U.S. senators, 101 U.S. representatives, 36 U.S. governors, and 34 U.S. ambassadors, making it a large producer of 19th-century U.S. statesmen.

Transylvania—Latin for "across the woods"—was the first college west of the Allegheny Mountains and was named for the short-lived Transylvania Colony. The Virginia General Assembly chartered Transylvania Seminary in 1780, before Kentucky became a state. It was chiefly promoted by Presbyterians. Initially situated in a log cabin in Boyle County, the school moved to Lexington in 1789. The first site in Lexington was a single building in what is now Gratz Park.

By 1799, the institution was called "Transylvania University". By 1818, a new main classroom building was constructed. It burned down in 1829, and the school moved north of Third Street. Old Morrison was erected in 1830–34 under the supervision of Henry Clay, who both taught law and was a member of Transylvania's Board. By 1818, the university included a medical school, law school, divinity school, and college of arts and sciences.

The Disciples of Christ church founded "Bacon College" in Georgetown. It operated from 1837 to 1851 and 1858 to 1861. It was renamed Kentucky University in 1858. In 1865, the remnants of the school were merged into Transylvania University. The merged institution took the name "Kentucky University."

Transylvania has dominated academe in the bluegrass region ever since and was the sought-after destination for the children of the South's political leadership, military families, and business elite. It attracted many politically ambitious young men, including Stephen F. Austin, the founder of Texas.

The new institution used Transylvania's campus in Lexington while keeping the name Kentucky University. The university was reorganized into several new colleges, including the Agricultural and Mechanical College (A&M) of Kentucky, publicly chartered as a department of Kentucky University as a land-grant institution under the Morrill Act. But due to questions about having a federally funded land-grant college controlled by a religious body, the A&M college was spun off in 1878 as an independent, state-run institution. The A&M of Kentucky soon developed into one of the state's flagship public universities, the University of Kentucky. Kentucky University's College of the Bible, which traced its roots to Bacon College's Department of Hebrew Literature, received a separate charter in 1878. Kentucky University's seminary eventually separated but remained on the same campus until 1950. It later changed its name to the Lexington Theological Seminary. In 1903, Hamilton College, a Lexington-based women's college founded in 1869, merged into Kentucky University.