Encyclopedia Dubuque
"Encyclopedia Dubuque is the online authority for all things Dubuque, written by the people who know the city best.”
Marshall Cohen—researcher and producer, CNN
Affiliated with the Local History Network of the State Historical Society of Iowa, and the Iowa Museum Association.
ALEXANDER COLLEGE
ALEXANDER COLLEGE. One of the Midwest's most publicized educational experiments of the 1850s. Promoters claimed the college was destined to become for Iowa what Yale was to Connecticut. Joshua Phelps, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Dubuque and president of the college, boasted of the institution's four-year preparatory course of literary, scientific and classical education. Additionally, there was planned a four-year college program and a law school with a faculty including Thomas S. WILSON, J. J. Dyer and the Reverend Phelps.
In 1885 the college, opened in the former home of James LANGWORTHY at 12th and Iowa STREETS, enrolled 107 boys in the preparatory department with two students in the college program. Disagreements among the leadership arose prior to moving to a new three-story building near the present site of the FINLEY HOSPITAL. Phelps resigned, and the college closed. Today the only trace of the institution is the name College Street along which the institution stood.