Located in New York City on land provided by Trinity Church, King's College secured its royal charter from King George II, by way of James DeLancey, acting governor of New York, on October 31, 1754. King's was the fifth of nine American colonial colleges in what later become the United States, its charter coming between that of the College of New Jersey (later, Princeton) in 1746 and the College of Philadelphia (later, the University of Pennsylvania) in 1755. Harvard, William & Mary and Yale had all preceeded it; Brown, Rutgers and Dartmouth would follow. King's was the smallest and richest of the colonial colleges.

The College's operations, which commenced in the summer of 1754,  were disrupted in the spring of 1775 when a New York City revolutionary mob threatened to kill the College's President Myles Cooper. He, his faculty and the College's governing board were all suspected -- correctly so, for the most part  -- of Loyalist sympathies. Closed throughout the Revolutionary War when New York City was occupied by the British, the College was reorganized, rechartered  and renamed in 1784 as "Columbia College." A subsequent charter in 1787 specified it as "Columbia College in the City of New York" and vested its governace in a self-perpetuating, 24-member Board of Trustees. From these two 18th-Century collegiate institutions  today's Columbia University traces its historical origins.