Nathaniel Colver

Dr. Nathaniel Colver, an abolitionist and theology professor at the Old University of Chicago, is the subject of this engraved portrait that serves as the frontispiece for the Memoir of Rev. Nathaniel Colver, D.D. (1873). Colver headed the Colver Institute in Richmond, a school for newly freed African Americans after the Civil War. In 1886 the school was renamed the Richmond Theological Institute, and in 1899 it became Virginia Union University.