also received the land these buildings were on, which became its campus. The College was dedicated on December 22, 1869. The "College" of Storer College When founded and for most of its existence, Storer did not offer what in the 21st century would be deemed a college education or college credits. Numerous other colleges, such as Tougaloo College, New-York Central College, West Virginia Wesleyan College, and Oberlin College, also offered instruction at a pre-college level. They were running in essence college-preparatory schools; in the 19th century, in many areas there were no schools preparing students for college. Even in the 20th century, most "junior colleges for Negroes" delivered primarily high-school-level instruction. At the time, credentials as understood today (2021)—college degrees, for example—were much less important, and the line between college and pre-college instruction was often blurry. Just as today with upper undergraduate and graduate students in the U.S., pre-college and college students might be in the same classroom, taking the same course at the same time, but at a different level of instruction. Medical schools, in the nineteenth century, did not require as prerequisite a college education as understood today (2021). Neither did teaching: normal schools to train teachers for public elementary schools offered high school level instruction. "I studied at X College" did not necessarily mean, then, that the person had received a college education. No one saw this as a problem, as a college education was much less important, and somewhat unusual. Having studied at the "prep school" gave some of the intellectual benefits and prestige of studying at the college. Storer was the first school for Blacks, ex-slaves or freeborn, in the new state of West Virginia, that was more than a one-room, one-teacher, "ungraded" operation (and there weren't many of those either). There was nothing similar, at least nearby, in any neighboring state. While training elementary school teachers in the normal school, there were also lots of illiterate adult students for the student teachers to instruct. Storer College spent much of its early years teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, as almost no one else in the state was providing this instruction to Blacks. Storer's Preparatory Division was preparing students for the Normal School, which required literacy. No one saw this as a problem; it was what the West Virginia Legislature expected when they chartered Storer College, described as "a high school for negroes" by a hostile