University of Louisville

community leaders who began local fundraising for what was then known as the Jefferson Seminary. It opened 15 years later and offered college and high school level courses in a variety of subjects. It was headed by Edward Mann Butler from 1813 to 1816, who later ran the first public school in Kentucky in 1829 and is considered Kentucky's first historian.
Despite the Jefferson Seminary's early success, pressure from newly established public schools and media critiques of it as "elitist" would force its closure in 1829.
Eight years later, in 1837, the Louisville city council established the Louisville Medical Institute at the urging of renowned physician and medical author Charles Caldwell. As he had earlier at Lexington's Transylvania University, Caldwell rapidly led LMI into becoming one of the leading medical schools in what was then considered the western US. In 1840, Louisville College, a sibling municipal liberal arts school chartered a few years earlier as the Louisville Collegiate Institute, was established. …