Franklin College was chartered on June 6, 1787
in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on the site of a former
brewery. It was named for Benjamin Franklin, who donated £200 to
the new institution. Founded by four prominent ministers from the German Reformed Church and the Lutheran Church, in conjunction with
numerous Philadelphians, the school was established as a German college whose goal was to help assimilate the German population into American culture. Its first trustees included four signers
of the Declaration of Independence, three
members of the Constitutional Convention and
seven officers of the Revolutionary War.The school's first classes were taught on July 16, 1787, with instruction taking place in both English and
German making it the first bilingual college in the United States. Franklin College
also enrolled the first Jewish female college student in the United States, Rebecca Gratz.In July of 1789, Franklin College ran into
financial difficulty as its annual tuition of four pounds was not enough to cover operating costs. Enrollment began to dwindle to
just a few students and eventually the college existed as nothing more than an annual meeting of the Board of Trustees. In an
effort to help the ailing school, an academy was established in 1807. For the next three
decades, Franklin College and Franklin Academy managed to limp along financially, with instructors supplementing their income
with private tutoring.In 1835, the school's Debating Society was renamed Diagnothian Literary Society at the
suggestion of seminary student Samuel Reed Fisher. In June of that year, Diagnothian was
divided into two friendly rivals to encourage debate. Diagnothian retained its original name, while the new society was named
Goethean, in honor of German philosopher and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The two organizations sponsored orations and debated politics, philosophy and literature. They merged together in 1955, but became separate entities again in 1989. The
Diagnothian Society is the oldest student organization on campus.