University of Tennessee, Knoxville History Milton M. Klein, University Historian 1988-1997

The University of Tennessee began as Blount College, chartered on September 10, 1794, by an act of the legislature of the Southwest Territory meeting in the territorial capital, Knoxville. The college was small at its inception; it struggled for the next thirteen years with a small student body and an even smaller faculty. In 1807, the institution received a new designation-East Tennessee College--and in 1840 was elevated in stature as East Tennessee University. Following the Civil War, the State of Tennessee made the University the beneficiary of the Morrill Act of 1862 which allocated federal land or its monetary value to the various states for the teaching of "agricultural and mechanical" subjects and to provide military training to students. Thus, the University of Tennessee (its designation after 1879) became a land-grant institution.