NORFOLK, Va. – The way the College of William and Mary sees it, if not for its alumni, most of modern-day Colorado may never have been sold by France.
So more than two centuries after Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe orchestrated the Louisiana Purchase, the Virginia college is hoping Coloradoans will support having one of their mountains named after it.
An application with the United States Board on Geographic Names was filed earlier this month to have a 14,134-foot geographical feature in Lake County, Colorado, named Mount William and Mary. The location is where the college has done extensive high-altitude research.
The college notes other mountains in Colorado are already named after out-of-state colleges, including Harvard, Princeton and Yale. But as recently as 2001, the Colorado Board of Geographic Names opposed naming the feature anything, much less Mount William and Mary.
