Dickinson College was grafted onto an early Presbyterian academy and was the first college to be founded in the new republic after the Revolution and the first on the western side of the Susquehanna. It offered proof that useful learning would follow the frontier west rather than be the captive of the old elites of the east. In the early nineteenth century, Dickinson's allegiance was transferred to the Baltimore Conference of the Methodist Church, and its architects were largely drawn from that city. That relationship ended after World War II.