Williams College

Williams College is a private liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was established in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams, a colonist from the Province of Massachusetts Bay who was killed in the French and Indian War in 1755, and it is the second-oldest institution of higher education in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Although the bequest from the estate of Ephraim Williams intended to establish a "free school," the exact meaning of which is ambiguous, the college quickly outgrew its initial ambitions and positioned itself as a "Western counterpart" to Yale and Harvard.