1751 and obtained its collegiate charter in 1755, it initially designated 1750 as its founding date; this is the year that appears on the first iteration of the university seal. Sometime later in its early history, Penn began to consider 1749 as its founding date and this year was referenced for over a century, including at the centennial celebration in 1849. In 1899, the board of trustees voted to adjust the founding date earlier again, this time to 1740, the date of "the creation of the earliest of the many educational trusts the University has taken upon itself". The board of trustees voted in response to a three-year campaign by Penn's General Alumni Society to retroactively revise the university's founding date to 1740 for a number of reasons, including to appear older than Princeton University, which had been chartered in 1746. First university The University of Pennsylvania also considers itself as the first university in the United States with both undergraduate and graduate studies. Penn has two claims to being the first university in the United States, according to the former university archives director Mark Frazier Lloyd: (1) the 1765 founding of the first medical school in America made Penn the first institution to offer both "undergraduate" and professional education ("the 'de facto' position") (2) the 1779 charter made it the first American institution of higher learning to take the name of "University" ("the 'de jure' position"). Original campus The Academy of Philadelphia, a secondary school for boys, began operations in 1751 in an unused church assembly hall building at 4th and Arch Streets which had sat unfinished and dormant for over a decade. Upon receiving a collegiate charter in 1755, the first classes for the College of Philadelphia were taught in the same building, in many cases to the same boys who had already graduated from The Academy of Philadelphia. When the British abandoned Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War, Penn's then only academic building "College Hall" served as temporary meeting site of the Second Continental Congress (from July 7 to July 20, 1778) as the British armed forces extensively damaged many parts of the city including the Pennsylvania State House (now known as Independence Hall), the site in which the Second Continental Congress had convened on May 10, 1775, and had been forced to abandon on December 12, 1776, to escape capture by the British. The Second Continental Congress