Western Reserve Academy was established on February 7, 1826 as the Western Reserve College and Preparatory School in Hudson, Ohio, on a plot of land set aside via charter by the Ohio legislature. The institution's name comes from the area in which it was built, the Connecticut Western Reserve, as it was the first of its kind in Northern Ohio. The settlers from Connecticut wanted to build a school of the same caliber as Yale College and the same design, with brick buildings and the same motto, Lux Et Veritas. People called it “the Yale of the West.” The first class of the school included eleven students at the college level and eight at the preparatory level. In 1882, the college section moved north to Cleveland and became Western Reserve University, later merging with the Case Institute of Technology to become Case Western Reserve University. Reserve is the 27th oldest preparatory boarding school in the United States, and the oldest outside of the Northeast.