Old Main – 1837

MAPLE GROVE: Old Main occupies a site once known as Maple Grove, about two miles below the village of Guyandotte. It was a grassy knoll covered by a thick stand of virgin timber: oaks, maples, beeches, and poplars. Maple Grove was a fourth of a mile from the Ohio River, rising some eighty feet above the low water mark of the river. Below the knoll on the east side flowed a small, meandering stream that ran northward through a small ravine to the Ohio River near Holderby’s Landing.

MOUNT HEBRON CHURCH: Perhaps as early as the 1820’s the local farmers cleared some of the timber and built on the crest of the knoll a crude, one-room log cabin, which they named Mount Hebron Church. They used the cabin for weekly worship services on Sunday. It was also used for a subscription school, probably during the winter months when the children were not needed for farming.

Marshall University started its rise from these humble beginnings in 1837 when a number of the local farmers decided that their children required a more fitting school building than the old cabin at Maple Grove.