Lebanon Valley College
private college in Pennsylvania, USA
Lebanon Valley College (LVC, Lebanon Valley, or The Valley) is a private university in Annville, Pennsylvania.
History
Lebanon Valley College was founded on February 23, 1866, with classes beginning May 7 of that year and its first class graduating in 1870. Expenses at this time for a full year were $206.50 (equal to approximately $5,260 in 2025) and remained relatively unchanged for the next 50 years.
Early history (1866–1897)
The college was founded by and initially associated with the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. Today, Lebanon Valley College is affiliated with the United Methodist Church, which occurred through a series of church mergers: The Church of the United Brethren in Christ merged with the Evangelical Association in 1946 creating the Evangelical United Brethren Church (EUB), which subsequently merged with the Methodist Church in 1968 to create the United Methodist Church. The ties to the Methodist Church are not as strong as they once were, which is evidenced by the lack of mandatory chapel services, but the church maintains a presence on the campus. Out of 34 colleges and academies founded by the United Brethren in Christ Church, Lebanon Valley was one of four to survive.
The campus began as a single building, the empty Annville Academy building, which was purchased for $4,500 (equal to $100,000 in 2025) by five Annville citizens. They presented the building as a gift to the East Pennsylvania Conference of the United Brethren Church to settle the argument over where to establish the college. In a little more than two months from its founding, 12 trustees were appointed, President Thomas R. Vickroy was elected, the building was repaired and redecorated, a curriculum was devised, faculty recruited, and classes began.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6511142. VIAF identifies the subject as 168792332. The Library of Congress control number is n83191022. Authority coordinates are 40.333, -76.515. 3 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1866, 1870, 2025 and 1897.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lebanon Valley 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.