INAUGURAL ADDRESS OF EDWIIsT WILLTTS. 



DELIVERED AUGUST 19, 1885. 



This institution is 28 years old. May 13, 1857, the buildings and grounds 

 were dedicated by the State Board of Education, with appropriate services, in 

 the presence of the governor, several officers of the State government, and a 

 large concourse of citizens from various jDortions of the State. It was the first 

 Agricultural College on the continent. Other States had moved in the same 

 direction, but Michigan forestalled all others in the enterprise of establishing 

 an institution of learning whose sole object should be the intelligent investiga- 

 tion and application of subjects pertaining to agriculture and the education 

 of young men into a higher and, if possible, better system of farming, as well 

 as into a cultured, practical manhood. 



The enterprise had been well considered. It was the creature of the Michigan 

 State Agricultural Society, and to the persistent exertions of that body the State 

 largely owes the prompt consideration given to the subject. As early as Dec. 

 19, 1849, at the second annual meeting of the executive committee of that 

 •society at Jackson, at which were present Gov. E. Eansom, F. S. Einlay, Bela 

 Hubbard, Michael Shoemaker and others, it was resolved to interest the Legis- 

 lature in establishing a state cential Agricultural office, with which should be 

 connected a museum of agricultural products and implements and an agricul- 

 tural library, and as soon as practicable an Agricnlturar College and a model 

 farm. A committee was duly appointed to memorialize the Legislature, and in 

 January, 1850, Bela Hubbard, for the committee, presented the subject to the 

 legislature in a well considered memorial, in which he set forth what special 

 subjects ought to be taught and summed up the scope of such an institution by 

 saying that there should be taught there " those branches of education which 

 •will tend to render agriculture not only a useful, but a learned and liberal pro- 

 fession, and its cultivators not the ' bone and sinew' merely, but ornaments of 

 society." 



Nothing came of the effort in the Legislature in 1850, but the sentiment had 

 ^rown so strong in its favor that the constitution of that year required the Leg- 

 islatur •, '-as soon as practicable, to provide for the establishment of an agricul- 

 tural school." At a meeting of the executive committee of said society, Dec. 

 14, 1852, Messrs. Dort, Shoemaker, and Moore were appo nted a committee to 

 urge upon the Legislature the immediate compliance with the provision of the 

 new constitution relative to the agricultural school, advising that it temporarily 

 be ado[)ted as a branch of the University; but that its permanent location 

 should not be established in immediate proximity to any existing educational 

 institution but on a model and experimental farm of 640 acres. The subject 



