The Genesee Wesleyan Seminary was founded in 1832 by the Genesee Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Lima, New York, south of Rochester. In 1850, it was resolved to enlarge the institution from a seminary into a college, or to connect a college with the seminary, becoming Genesee College. However, the location was soon thought by many to be insufficiently central. Its difficulties were compounded by the next set of technological changes: the railroad that displaced the Erie Canal as the region's economic engine bypassed Lima completely. The trustees of the struggling college then decided to seek a locale whose economic and transportation advantages could provide a better base of support. The college began looking for a new home at the same time that Syracuse, ninety miles to the east, was engaged in a search to bring a university to the city, having failed to convince Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White to locate Cornell University there rather than in Ithaca. White pressed that the university should locate on the hill in Syracuse (the current location of Syracuse University) due to the city's attractive transportation hub, which would ease the recruitment of faculty, students, and other persons of note. However, as a young carpenter working in Syracuse, Cornell had been robbed of his wages, not once but twice[16] and thereafter considered Syracuse a Sodom and Gomorrah insisting that the university be located in Ithaca on his large farm on East Hill, overlooking the town and Cayuga Lake.
There were several years of dispute between the Methodist ministers, Lima, and contending cities across the state, over proposals to move Genesee College to Syracuse. While libraries, students, faculty, and two secret societies all relocated to Syracuse, at its founding on March 24, 1870, the state of New York granted the University its charter independent of Genesee College. Bishop Jesse Truesdell Peck was elected the first president of the Board of Trustees. George F. Comstock, a member of the new University's Board of Trustees, had offered the school 50 acres (200,000 m2) of farmland on a hillside to the southeast of the city center. Comstock intended Syracuse University and the hill to develop as an integrated whole; a contemporary account described the latter as "a beautiful town ... springing up on the hillside and a community of refined and cultivated membership ... established near the spot which will soon be the center of a great and beneficent educational institution.
