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Syracuse resident White pressed that the new university should locate on the hill in Syracuse (the current location of Syracuse University) due to the city's attractive transportation hub, which would ease the recruitment of faculty, students, and other persons of note. The college began looking for a new home at the same time Syracuse, ninety miles to the east, was engaged in a search to bring a university to the city, having failed to convince Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White to locate Cornell University there rather than in Ithaca. The Old Row, campus of Syracuse University, 1920 The trustees of the struggling college then decided to seek a locale whose economic and transportation advantages could provide a better base of support. Its difficulties were compounded by the next set of technological changes: the railroad that displaced the Erie Canal as the region's economic engine bypassed Lima completely. However, the location was soon thought by many to be insufficiently central. In 1850, it was resolved to enlarge the institution from a seminary into a college, or to connect a college with the seminary, becoming Genesee College.
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The seminary was founded in 1831 by the Genesee annual conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Lima, New York, south of Rochester. The institution's roots can be traced to the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary.
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Established in 1870 with roots in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the university has been nonsectarian since 1920. Syracuse University (informally ' Cuse or SU) is a private research university in Syracuse, New York. It is now the home of the College of Visual and Performing Arts and the Setnor School of Music. Crouse College, a Romanesque building completed in 1889, housed the first College of Fine Arts in the U.S.
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