The effort to establish a college at Easton began on Christmas Eve 1824, when the Easton Centinel published a call for Northampton County residents friendly to founding a college there to meet at White's Hotel on Center Square. Local lawyers James Madison Porter and Joel Jones, together with Jacob Wagener, led plans for a college that would combine practical military science with literature and general science. The founders chose the name Lafayette College in honor of Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of the Revolution whom Porter had recently met in Philadelphia, and the governor of Pennsylvania signed the college's charter on March 9, 1826. In 1832, the Rev. George Junkin agreed to move the curriculum and student body of the Manual Labor Academy of Pennsylvania from Germantown to Easton and assume the Lafayette College charter, and classes in mathematics and the classics began that year in a rented farmhouse on the south bank of the Lehigh River. Also in 1832, the college acquired nine acres on the hill across Bushkill Creek from Easton, an area that soon became known as College Hill, and its first buildings were erected in 1834. Enrollment stood at about 300 by 1900, exceeded 500 in 1910, reached 1,000 during the 1920s, and more than doubled again after World War II. Today the campus includes about 100 acres and more than 60 buildings, along with outlying properties on College Hill and elsewhere, with over 2,300 students enrolled in more than 40 fields of study.
