Bowdon College was Georgia’s fifth chartered institution of higher education and its first coeducational institution. In the frontier community of Bowdon, merchants and yeomen fostered a school where earnest students of limited means improved their lives and their communities. The college closed briefly when all but two students, one blind and one with no arms, entered the Confederate Army. Its president, Charles A. McDaniel, and 128 of its 144 students died in the war. Bowdon citizens relied on state funds to sustain the school only twice in its history. After the Civil War, Bowdon was one of five Georgia colleges commissioned to provide free tuition to poor and maimed Confederate veterans. That program ended in 1869, and under financial strain the trustees voted to make the college coeducational. An act creating Bowdon State Normal School passed in August 1919. After state funding for Bowdon was terminated, local citizens kept it going as a junior college from 1934 to 1936. Its graduates went on to serve in state and national capitals and around the world as educators, doctors, lawyers, journalists, judges, bankers, farmers, industrialists, governors, and senators, and the college founded in the wilderness came to be known as the Athens of the West.