On his own and through Dr. Henry Morehouse of the Baptist Home Mission Society in New York, Rockefeller began buying up large tracts of land on Atlanta’s West Side. He housed the Spelman students in an old Union Army barracks pending the completion in 1886 of Rockefeller Hall, the first brick building on the new Spelman campus. He gave adjacent lands to two Baptist colleges for Negro men, including a college named after Dr. Morehouse, who became president of the Spelman board.
