sentences:  Despite a prolonged effort by the new Wesleyan University president, William H. Anderson, the institution continued to founder, and in 1871, the doors of Wesleyan Hall were closed.Recognizing the need for trained teachers in the post-war South, the Methodist Episcopal Church turned over Wesleyan Hall and the surrounding grounds to the state of Alabama, which then chartered it as a state normal school.When the Methodist Church deeded Florence Wesleyan to the State of Alabama in 1872, the institution became the State Normal School at Florence, the first state-supported teachers college south of the Ohio River.