Grinnell College
liberal arts college in Iowa, United States
Grinnell College ( grin-EL) is a private liberal arts college in Grinnell, Iowa, United States. It was established as Iowa College in 1846 by a group of Congregationalists from New England. It has an "open curriculum," which means students need not follow a prescribed list of classes. The college's 120-acre (49 ha) campus includes several listings on the National Register of Historic Places.
History
In 1843, eleven Congregational ministers, all of whom trained at Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, set out to preach on the frontier. The group also sought to establish a college, which followed in 1846, when they collectively established Iowa College in Davenport.
The first 25 years of Grinnell's history saw a change in name and location. In Davenport, the college had advocated against slavery and saloons, leading to conflict with the Davenport city council, which retaliated by constructing roads that transected the campus. Iowa College moved farther west from Davenport to the town of Grinnell and unofficially adopted the name of its new home, which itself had been named for the abolitionist minister Josiah Bushnell Grinnell. The name of the corporation, "The Trustees of Iowa College", remained, but in 1909 the name "Grinnell" was adopted by the trustees for the institution.
“Grinnell College” enters the record as liberal arts college in Iowa, United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Grinnell, College and liberal can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Grinnell College” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Grinnell, College and liberal provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2982991. VIAF identifies the subject as 151963847. The Library of Congress control number is n83030003. Authority coordinates are 41.751, -92.720. 1 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1846, 1843 and 1909.
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This entry incorporates text from “Grinnell College” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.