Adelphi: The Brooklyn Years (1863-1928)
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The origins of what would become Adelphi University reach back to the Civil War period when, in 1863, two preparatory school teachers established a small school in northwestern Brooklyn.
The brownstone where they began holding classes was located on Adelphi Street, and they chose to adopt the name of the street as the name of their school—Adelphi Academy.
From its modest beginnings as a prep school with fewer than 30 enrolled students, Adelphi Academy would grow over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century alongside the rapidly expanding city of Brooklyn. Adelphi College, an outgrowth of Adelphi Academy’s collegiate division, received its charter and was incorporated, in 1896, as a fully accredited degree-granting institution of higher education (at the time becoming one of only two colleges, and the only coeducational liberal arts college, in Brooklyn).
This exhibition highlights the 65 years of Adelphi history which precedes the 1929 relocation of what was then Adelphi College to Garden City.