Lincoln University has been teaching students for 150 years - beginning with just two students, Henry Brown and Cornelius Chappelle.
On either Friday, Sept. 14, or Monday, Sept. 17, 1866 - different records show different dates - Richard Baxter Foster welcomed those two students to class in a dilapidated wooden shack on the side of "Hobo Hill," overlooking the east branch of Wears Creek in Jefferson City.
The Simonsen 9th Grade Center now stands on the top of that same hill.
Foster said the building had no windows, but holes in the floorboard and walls large enough to "throw a dog through" and a leaky roof that let the rain fall freely into the building.
In fact, rain - and flooding - had delayed the start of classes for a week.
Before the Civil War, that building had been the first Jefferson City public school.
Lincoln's initial beginning came in January 1866, as soldiers of the 62nd and 65th Missouri Colored Infantry units and their white officers were waiting in Texas to be released from service following the Civil War's end.
They talked about providing basic education to newly freed slaves and other black people who had been denied rights to an education under an 1847 Missouri law.
"Lincoln University today serves a community that is much different than the community in 1866, when more than 100,000 former slaves had just been emancipated in Missouri," Gary Kremer, director of the State Historical Society and an LU graduate, told the News Tribune last week.
"And yet, it seems to me that the thread that runs through the Lincoln history is the thread of supporting students whose families are new to higher education - like my own.
"No one from my family had ever gone to college when I came to Lincoln 50 years ago this month."
During the war, Foster - then a U.S. Army lieutenant - and other officers had helped the soldiers learn some of the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic.
At LU's Founders Day Convocation last February, Don Cook - a 1967 graduate and current curator - said: "Even the most outdated spaces on our campus have no comparison to learning around the flickering light of a campfire."
When they decided they should start a school in Missouri, the soldiers raised more than $6,000 in cash and pledges to pay for the dream of teaching freed men and former slaves how to read and write and to combine both "study and labor."
When LU officials were raising money in the early 2000s for the Soldiers Memorial that now sits on the campus Quadrangle, their research determined Lincoln was the only U.S. college or university founded by soldiers.
Some of those founding soldiers pledged a year's salary or more.
They entrusted that money to Foster, a Connecticut native, who planned to start Lincoln Institute in St. Louis, then Missouri's largest city and one of the nation's largest.
But he found many white St. Louisans didn't like the idea of a school to teach black people, and many of the city's blacks didn't like the idea of whites running the school.
So he moved his plans to Jefferson City, the state capital.
Foster's daughter, Grace, later wrote in her autobiography Jefferson Citians also wanted to block the new school: "They could not rent a building, not even a church.
"Everyone was opposed to having a school for Negroes in their midst; the crazy Yankee could take his school somewhere else or go jump in the river."
When the family was asked to leave Jefferson City, Foster posted notice he'd protect his premises with an armed guard.
Lincoln's beginnings were rocky financially as well, operating only on tuition and donations for its first few years.
"In 1870, it began to get state support, in a $5,000 appropriation," Kremer noted. "And then, in 1879, the state of Missouri took the school over completely."
In 1871, Lincoln Institute began building on the hill above Lafayette and Dunklin streets - the present campus site.
In his statement honoring the latest anniversary, President Kevin Rome said: "Now, here we are, marking our place in a history that has stretched through this first 150 (years) and, with the continued devotion like those who have come before us, Lincoln will mark many more great milestones."
In 1890, when Congress passed the Second Morrell Act, Lincoln was one of the colleges getting land grant status similar to the University of Missouri's.
"Lincoln has never gotten the full recognition as a land grant institution - the full funding - in the way that the University of Missouri and the other 'white' universities have," Kremer said of the congressional act. "But still, I think it was a significant boost for Lincoln.
"And it did, in some ways, solidify Lincoln's role as a vocational, agricultural and technical school."
In 1921 - 55 years after its founding - Lincoln Institute became a state university.
Although it's not created in the state Constitution like the University of Missouri, state law requires the LU Board of Curators to "organize after the manner of the board of curators of the state University of Missouri; and (with the same) powers, authority, responsibilities, privileges, immunities, liabilities and compensation (as) the board of curators of the state University of Missouri "
After the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that segregation was unconstitutional, Lincoln became more attractive to white, Mid-Missouri students.
"I think that it was and is a place of opportunity for marginalized Missourians," Kremer said. "I'm not trying to suggest that all people who go to Lincoln are marginalized or disadvantaged - but I think that Lincoln has a unique, historical gift of being able to provide an educational opportunity to students who did have fewer advantages than many people in society."
Again he pointed to himself, a northern Osage County native with no exposure to higher education until he started attending LU in 1966.
He gained a love of history, eventually teaching at LU, then serving as state archivist, teaching at Fulton's William Woods University and finally heading the Columbia-based State Historical Society.
Rome said: "I hope that (people) will join me in moments of reflection on our very humble beginnings, our growth and growing pains and even in dreams about our future."
He also asked people to be "proud of our past, diligent in our present and devoted to a progressive future. We've made it this far, and together, we can begin our trek to a celebration of future anniversaries, each more monumental than the last."