Ohio University turned 221 years old in 2025. Celebrated every Feb. 18, Founder’s Day marks the day the Ohio General Assembly passed an act establishing the university in 1804.
The namesakes of Cutler Hall and Rufus the Bobcat – Menassah Cutler and Rufus Putnam, the men who led the Ohio Company into the territory OU now resides on – have been memorialized in long-standing monuments and symbols across campus. Each year, Founder’s Day honors the inception of the university through temporary celebrations.
Celebration of Founder’s Day has differed over the years, from maypole dancing in 1915 to a concert in Baker University Center in 2011. This year, there was a small celebration featuring cake and punch in the third floor atrium of Baker Center. In honor of the 221 years since the founding, the Cutler Hall bell chimes played "Alma Mater, Ohioat 2:21 p.m.
There was also a virtual 5K, which is an ongoing challenge for Bobcats to collectively run 730 miles, the distance from Cutler Hall to the Bunch of Grapes Tavern in Boston, Massachusetts, where the idea of OU first came to be.
Along with a virtual trivia night and webinar on the history of OU, there was also a Founder’s Day spring student showcase at Alden Library in which students presented various physical and digital exhibits relating to OU’s history.
Miriam Intrator, head of Archives & Special Collections and Rare Book Librarian, spoke about the event and Alden Library’s related work.
“The exhibit ‘Out and Proud' is the Founder’s Day exhibit for this year,” Intrator said. “It’s a digital and physical exhibit curated by two of our fall interns, and so this event was the opening of those exhibits as well as an opportunity to showcase the work of all our other interns and student employees.”
Owen Keller, a junior studying film, works for the digital archives at Alden Library and presented a slideshow featuring archived photos that were top-liked posts on Alden Library’s Instagram account.
“People love fall and people love winter on our social medias,” Keller said. “Anything that's colorful or has snow … and then people love nostalgia, they love couples and pictures of Alden.”
The slideshow provided a window for students and faculty alike to glimpse how OU used to look.
Katie Ulvright, a sophomore studying English, discussed her involvement with her exhibit.
“My internship is about women's history and culture here at the university,” Ulvright said. “I'm making a library guide of all the collections because we don't have one yet.”
The exhibit featured a scrapbook from the 1920s that a student made. Ulvright explained the value of creating guides for certain archives in the library.
“It was crazy to me that we didn't have a library guide already for all this stuff,” Ulvright said. “It's something that definitely should have a resource … I think it'll make it a lot easier for students to find things for projects.”
Zoe Duncan, a junior studying art history, highlighted some late medieval works OU has in its collection.
“My goal is to just show everyone what the Farfel collection has,” Duncan said. “We have a lot of individual pages from just a wide range of things, and they're all digitized but it's sometimes hard to know where to start looking or what we even have.”
The Farfel collection was donated by Dr. Gilbert Farfel in honor of his wife, Ursula Farfel, who was an OU alumnae.
Duncan discussed one of the works which featured a page from a Latin bible.
“It tells the story of Judith,” Duncan said. “She beheaded Holofernes, who was a Babylonian war leader, and she's been widely regarded as a feminist figure because he originally intended to rape her. But it's also just a story of Christian triumph over Babylonian paganism at the time.”
Duncan also explained the significance of archival work.
“I see archival work as some form of archeology, or at least material culture collection,” she said. “We have such a wide range of things that I'm sure everyone has a different story, but it just related a lot to what I love to study.”
