The offer of a lot of ground in the town of Lexington[2] to the trustees of _Transylvania Seminary_, by a company of gentlemen calling themselves the "_Transylvania Land Company_," induced the trustees to permanently locate the seminary in that place in 1793. On that lot the first school and college buildings were placed, and on it was afterward erected the more commodious _University_ edifice in which taught the learned and celebrated President, Doctor Horace Holley. This first _University_ building was destroyed by fire May 9, 1829. In later years (1879) this old "College lot" was beautified and improved by tree-planting and otherwise by liberal citizens of Lexington, moved by the efforts of Mr. H. H. Gratz, and designated first "Centennial Park,"[3] and afterward "Gratz Park," in honor of Benjamin Gratz, being not now utilized for special educational purposes. With limited success the first "_Director_ of Transylvania Seminary" taught in Lexington until 1794, when he was superseded by the election by the Board of Trustees of Mr. Harry Toulmin as first President of the Seminary. This gentleman, a learned Unitarian minister of the school of Doctor Priestly, and a native of England, resigned the Presidency in 1796, and was Secretary of State of Kentucky under Governor Garrard. (See _Collins' History of Kentucky_, volume 2, page 184.) Intense feeling at the election of Mr. Toulmin on the part of the leading Presbyterians, who claimed the Seminary as their own peculiar institution, caused them to obtain in 1796 a charter from the Legislature of Kentucky--now a State--for a new institution of learning which they could more exclusively control. This was the "Kentucky Academy," of which the Reverend James Blythe, of their communion, was made President.[4] On the establishment of the _Kentucky Academy_ by the dissatisfied Presbyterians in 1796, an active rivalry between that school and Transylvania Seminary operated to the injury of both institutions as well as to the cause of education in general. Therefore, after two years of separate existence these two institutions, with the consent of the trustees of both, were united in 1798 by Act of the General Assembly of Kentucky into one, "for the promotion of public good and learning," under the title of _Transylvania University_. The consolidation was made under the original laws which governed the Transylvania Seminary as enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia. TRANSYLVANIA UNIVERSITY. Under the act of consolidation of December 22, 1798, this University was organized by the appointment of Reverend James Moore, of the Episcopal Church, as first acting President, with a corps of professors. And now, _for the first time_ in the Mississippi Valley, was the effort made to establish a _medical college_.