In 1850, Chicago was only a 17-year-old city of 28,000 inhabitants that was increasingly becoming the center of trade for both steamships and railroads. The political and cultural environment of the mid-nineteenth century resulted in individual states granting charters to hundreds of small colleges rather than a few centralized national institutions as was typical in European countries. These colleges were highly sectarian and were motivated by the desire to both increase the quality of ministerial training as well as to discourage its young people from attending schools controlled by rival denominations. On May 31, 1850, John Evans, Grant Goodrich, Henry W. Clark, Andrew Brown, Orrington Lunt, Jabez Botsford, Richard Haney, Richard H. Blanchard, and Zodoc Hall met in a law office above a hardware store at 69 West Lake Street in Chicago and resolved that "the interests of sanctified learning require the immediate establishment of a university in the Northwest under the patronage of the Methodist Episcopal Church." While each of the founders had diverse educational, socioeconomic, and geographic backgrounds, they were all devout Methodists as well as successful and established businessmen, ministers, and lawyers within Chicago. Despite their evangelism, the founders were committed to the establishment of a non-sectarian institution reflecting both the worldly educational philosophy of the Methodist movement and the political realities of the Illinois state legislature adverse to chartering church-affiliated colleges.