In 1836 the Georgia Methodist Conference founded Emory College, named for Bishop John Emory, and in early 1837 purchased 1452 acres, setting aside 330 acres for a college town that became the first collegiate community of its kind in American Methodism. Named Oxford in honor of the Wesleys' university, the town was designed by Methodist minister and surveyor Edward Lloyd Thomas, and its original streets were named for notable Methodists. More than 20 nineteenth-century buildings and sites related to Methodism still stand, including the Alexander Means House, the oldest house in Oxford, built by a Virginian in the 1820s. Emory College moved to Atlanta in 1919 and became the College of Arts and Sciences of Emory University, which had been founded in 1915 by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, while the junior college established in 1929 continued on the original campus as Oxford College of Emory University. Many prominent southern Methodists were associated with the town and college, including Bishop James O. Andrew, whose ownership of his wife's inherited slave girl, Kitty, precipitated the division between northern and southern Methodism in 1844; Kitty's cottage stands beside the Old Church, built in 1841. In 1880 Bishop Atticus G. Haygood, then president of Emory College, delivered in that church his Thanksgiving Day sermon, "The New South; Gratitude, Amendment, Hope," a turning point in race relations and social reform in southern Methodism and in the South. Allen Memorial Church, built in 1910, honored Young J. Allen, an 1858 Emory graduate who became the first Methodist missionary to China and served there from 1860 to 1907. Oxford Historical Cemetery, part of the town's original plan and known as "The Westminster of Georgia Methodism," contains the graves of Bishops James O. Andrew, Atticus G. Haygood, and Warren A. Candler, along with eight Emory College presidents and many professors and ministers.