A college was founded within 1869 per German Reformed Church. It was known as when Zacharias Ursinus, a 16th-century German theologist & an significant figure in the Protestant Reformation. Women were 1st admitted to Ursinus around 1881. A college was founded on the evidence of Freeland Seminary. Notable facilities at Ursinus include a Phillip & Muriel Berman Museum of Art & a Walter W. Marstellar Memorial Observatory.

One of Ursinus's virtually all notable students was The Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger (1937 to 1938). He left a school fallowing a single semester & continued his studies elsewhere. Computer pioneer John Mauchly, creator of the ENIAC, was a academician at Ursinus for many years & did virtually all of the computer's early development at Ursinus's research lab within Pfahler Hall, the big building which however stands in campus.

A literary papers of writer Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, a member of the Ursinus Class of 1923 & mother of National Institute of Arts and Letters novelist John Updike are kept at a Myrin Library. A school's library besides has the Pennsylvania German archive and is one of troika government repositories around Montgomery County.

Large Ursinus alumni include Gerald Edelman, winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize in medicine; Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America; James F. Scott II, director of the Magellan Space Mission at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and Sam Keen, noted author, professor of philosophy and religion, and former contributing editor of Psychology Today. Each of Updike's parents (Wesley R. & Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, Class of 1923) graduated from Ursinus; he was mass produced an honorary graduate within 1964.