Ursinus College is a liberal arts college in Collegeville, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. 1867 Members of the German Reformed Church begin plans to establish a college where "young men could be liberally educated under the benign influence of Christianity." These founders were hoping to establish an alternative to the seminary at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, a school they believed was increasingly heretical to traditional Reformed faith. 1869 The college is granted a charter by the Legislature of Pennsylvania to begin operations in its current location on the grounds of Todd’s School (founded 1832) and the adjacent Freeland Seminary (founded 1848). Dr. John Henry Augustus Bomberger, for whom the campus' signature Romanesque building is named (see Gallery, below), served as the college’s first president until his death in 1890. Bomberger had proposed naming the college after Zacharias Ursinus, a 16th-century German theologian and an important figure in the Protestant Reformation, in order to declare the Reformed orthodoxy of the College.