The Day Harvard Got Its Name
On this day · 13 March 1639
A dying clergyman's gift of books and money won the new colonial college a name that would outlast empires.
When Puritan colonists set up a college in the Massachusetts Bay village of New Towne (today’s Cambridge) in 1636, it had no name worth remembering. That changed thanks to John Harvard, a young English minister who had crossed the Atlantic only to die of consumption in 1638, at about thirty years old.
In his will, Harvard left the fledgling school roughly half his estate and his personal library. The bequest came to 779 pounds, 17 shillings, and two pence and some 320 books — a fortune for a frontier colony short on both cash and learning.
On March 13, 1639, the Massachusetts General Court ordered “that the colledge agreed upon formerly to bee built at Cambridg shalbee called Harvard Colledge.”
The gesture honored a benefactor, not a founder; Harvard never taught there and likely never saw the campus. Yet the name stuck. The eight-month-old “Colledg at Newetowne” became Harvard College, seeding the oldest institution of higher education in what would become the United States.
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