Rather than creating a “new Northland,” we aim to create the True Northland. A Northland that lives up to its mission, commitment, values, and history.

Northland College Mission

Founded in 1892, Northland College is the first college in the country to fully integrate an environmental focus with its liberal arts curriculum. Located on the south shore of Lake Superior, surrounded by northern forests, we inspire students to explore the fundamental interconnections between nature, place, and people.

Our innovative, interdisciplinary learning approach fosters dynamic educational experiences, research, and partnerships that extend well beyond the classroom. We believe that understanding and addressing complex environmental and social challenges requires inclusion of diverse perspectives, critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration.

Together, we empower students and our broader community to act with integrity and courage to create a more sustainable and just future.

Northland College History

While the entirety of Northland’s history is beyond the scope of this website, over the next few days we will post photographs, historical documents, and other resources that help tell the story of Northland.

A Brief History of Northland by Charles Krysinski

The roots of Northland’s founding lay in an era known as the great cutover. After nineteenth century lumber barons stripped Northern Wisconsin of its old growth forests, Northland’s founders came together with a desire to create a place to learn in the midst of a devasted natural landscape. Ever since the cornerstone laying in 1892 the arc of Northland’s mission has centered on a restored relationship to place. Founded in the context of environmental devastation, what grew out of that scarred landscape was an institution with the hope for social-ecological healing at its center. As Emeritus Professor David Saetre writes, Northland ‘s significance was in “the promise of an institution dedicated to people at the margins, from immigrant farm families and laborers in the forests and quarries to native youth from the Ojibwe reserves created by the Treaty of 1854.”

Northland has persisted for over 130 years due to the passion and commitment of those who gather here and call it home. From the very beginning the institution struggled financially. After securing the necessary pledges to construct the College’s main building Wheeler Hall, the economic downturn of 1893 resulted in a loss of investment. As the brownstone foundation sat unfinished for over a year, the College’s founders worked tirelessly to secure new donations to complete the construction.

As the building slowly took shape, one of Northland’s earliest boosters, Dr. Edwin Ellis, volunteered the use of his downtown Ashland National Bank building to host the College’s first classes. A true champion of the Northland vision, Dr. Ellis arranged to have the Ashland National Bank forego the remainder of the College’s mortgage payments on Wheeler Hall. On January 17, 1900, according to the Ashland Daily Press, “nearly a thousand citizens trudged two miles on slippery walks” in order to join in the celebration of the event. Gathered in the Academy’s assembly room, trustee W.M. Tompkins stood “crumbling the dead mortgage in his hands while the audience stared in profound silence” before he lit the package of papers on fire.

Northland’s history has something important to say in this moment of economic precarity for the College. It was a campus built on the margins and for the marginalized. The mystery at the heart of the Northland story is the radical commitment to return, again and again, to the question of how to heal the wounds of the world.