years of its history. The Bladen mansion, now known as McDowell Hall,
was repaired and enlarged and, on August 11, 1789, Bishop Carroll was
elected president of the Board of Visitors and Governors and Dr. John
McDowell accepted the Professorship of Mathematics. After unsuccessful
attempts to obtain a principal from England, Dr. McDowell was chosen to
that position in the following year and continued in office, until the
State withdrew its aid to the college in 1805. He was a man of great
learning and was very successful at St. John's and later at the
University of Pennsylvania as provost. Under him, St. John's flourished
greatly and many men of a national reputation were enrolled among its
students, from the time the first class graduated in 1793.

The same disaster fell on St. John's, as on Washington College. The
Legislature withdrew the annual grant given by the State. The same doubt
as to the constitutionality of this withdrawal existed here, and the
State confirmed its position in the same way, by increasing its
appropriation in 1832,[10] on condition of the college's accepting it in
full satisfaction of all claims against the State under the original
charter. Of late years Maryland has been quite generous to St. John's,
but it has never quite recovered the station and prestige it lost by the
taking away of the State's grant in 1805.

In the first despair over the Act of the Legislature, the Visitors and
Governors voted to discontinue the college, but their courage soon
returned and the Rev. Bethel Judd, elected principal in 1807, was able
to graduate a class in 1810. After his withdrawal in 1812, matters were
in a disturbed state for some years and no classes were graduated until
1822, when Rev. Henry L. Davis, the father of Maryland's famous orator,
Henry Winter Davis, was principal. After that year there were no
graduates until 1827, when Rev. William Rafferty was head of the