1889 – St Leo University was chartered in Pasco County on this date. St. Leo was the first Catholic college in Florida named after Pope Leo the Great. The college was temporarily phased out to become a prep-school but was reopened in 1959. The school steadily grew in the following decades and in 1999 St .Leo established one of the first online degree programs in the country, building on a long tradition of providing distance degree programs for U.S. military personnel. Today St. Leo is still one of the largest providers of higher education to military-related personnel in the U.S.