Memorial College, Brecon

Brecon Congregational Memorial College was a Congregational college in Brecon, Powys, Mid Wales. The college graduated ministers and missionaries who went to work in Africa and India. There were classes in biblical literature, chemistry, classical languages, logic, psychology, theism, theology, trigonometry, German language, and Welsh language. The college was established in Carmarthen in 1757, and was located in Brecon from 1839. The Memorial College building in Brecon was opened in 1869. After the last principal left in 1959, the college was closed. The building is now named Camdem Court and is used for sheltered housing.

The college originated as the Congregational Academy which in 1757 separated from the Independent Academy in Carmarthen. In its early years the Congregational Academy was based in several towns in Wales: in Abergavenny, Oswestry, Wrexham, Llanfyllin and Newtown, before finally settling in Brecon. From 1839 to 1869 the college was based in St Mary's Street, Brecon.

The Memorial College on Camden Road was opened on 15 and 16 September 1869. This edifice belonged to the Independents, and its erection was designed to perpetuate the memory of the 2000 clergy ejected from the Church of England in 1662. The college, as an institution, is not new, but up to this time it had no building worthy of its past history or position. Its historical source is twofold: the first and earliest, the Academy at Brynllywarch, near Bridgend, Glamorganshire, founded by Samuel Jones, A.M. (once a tutor at Jesus College, Oxford), soon after his ejection from the National Church in 1662, the immortal era which the new edifice commemorates; the next and latest source, Tewkesbury Academy, in Gloucestershire, taught by a distinguished man also named Samuel Jones, and who could, according to Fitzgerald, the editor of Butler's Analogy, number among his scholars many names that might confer honour on any University in Christendom.

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