The original University of Washington, built in 1861 by Daniel Bagley and Arthur Denny, near what's now the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in downtown Seattle.
The University of Washington is a respected institution of higher learning, serving more than 92,000 students on campuses in Seattle, Bothell and Tacoma. But it didn’t quite start out this way; in its first 25 years, the school went broke and even shut down for a brief time. It barely had enough students and faculty to fill a large room.