Evan Semón
In the late 1800s, Presbyterian ministers came up with the idea of establishing a “Princeton of the West” in the Denver area. Henry J. Mayham, a native of New York who’d moved to Colorado, realized that land he owned between Denver and Boulder might increase in value if a Presbyterian university was set up nearby, so he donated 640 acres of land to the Denver Presbytery.
Forty acres of that donation would be used for the campus of Westminster University, eighty acres for a farm to support and feed the school, and the rest divided up and sold for the predicted community that would develop around the project.