It closed during Reconstruction, and some of its former campus is now part of the Alcorn State University Historic District.

[1][2] They hired Jeremiah Chamberlain, a Presbyterian minister educated at Dickinson College and the Princeton Theological Seminary, as the first President.

[6] The land, spanning 250 acres (0.39 sq mi; 101.17 ha), was donated by planter Robert Cochran.

[1][6] The first class took place on May 14, 1830, at the private residence of Mrs John E. Dromgoole, the wife of a slave trader,[1] with three students attending.

[1] According to historian Mary Carol Miller, its alumni pool included "twenty-one ministers, thirty-nine attorneys, and nineteen physicians.

[10] Hiram B. Granbury, an attorney who served as a Brigadier General in the Confederate States Army during the Civil War, was also an alumni.

[13][12][14] For the 1858–1859 school year, according to an old prospectus, tuition was $30 per term, "boarding and washing, $18 per month," with a graduating fee of $10.

[6] The college closed during the war, as students and faculty either joined the Confederate States Army, or were slain for their pro-Unionist views.

The Reconstruction legislature purchased the campus and used it as the location of Alcorn University in honor of Republican governor James L.

[19] After Reconstruction, the Presbyterian Church established Chamberlain-Hunt Academy in 1879, a military private school located in Port Gibson, Mississippi.

[10][16] Two reports about Oakland College from the faculty, the trustees, and the Presbyterian synod of Mississippi are preserved at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at Chapel Hill.