LECTURES AND ESSAYS READ AT INSTITUTES. 359 



Texas, Missouri, Michigan, Kansas, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, and Oregon. 

 The experiments and addresses of her officers have been published and 

 approved in France and England. 



I propose now to give the earlier history of the college, more especially up 

 to its reorganization under a State Board of Agriculture in 1861. Subse- 

 quently to this reorganization there have been published an annual catalogue 

 and regular reports; but up to the year 1861 there were no catalogues of 

 students except that issued just after the first opening of the institution, and 

 imperfect lists for some of the terms. The reports, too, for these earlier years 

 are very imperfect. But I became an officer of the college at the beginning of 

 its second year, and in the first year I visited the college. The officers, when 

 I first visited it, lived in the city of Lansing, all except two unmarried men, 

 and went to and from their work over hills and through valleys, over a decayed 

 plank road and through a swamp sometimes covered with water. Arrived at 

 the college, the buildings — a college hall, a boarding house, a brick barn, all 

 there were — were in a clearing in the forest, where stumps of trees came up to 

 doors of the buildings. The first President was then there ; so was Mr. J. C. 

 Holmes, to whom, more than to any other, the college owes its existence. An 

 acquaintance, therefore, with the founders and first officers and students of the 

 college has enabled me to present, with some fullness, the records of those 

 earlier times. Many of the men who had to do with its organization and 

 early management are still living and still the true friends of the college. Not 

 a few of its very earliest students are still known to me, and more would have 

 been, but that alas ! the civil war seems to have drawn very largely from the 

 early students of the college. All of the first graduating class of seven (1861), 

 except the two victims of the war, are still living. Fourteen of its students 

 on its opening day are still personally known to me, and one* of them was a 

 Senator in the last (1883) Legislature. I have in some cases gathered remi- 

 niscences from tliese persons, who are by nearly a year older in the college 

 than myself. 



It is now (July, 1883) somewhat more than a quarter of a century since the 

 Michigan State Agricultural College was opened to students, the twenty-fifth 

 scholastic year having ended with the commencement exercises of August 13, 

 1882. The college is the oldest of the existing agricultural colleges of the 

 country; was, therefore, the pioneer institution of the kind. It has had a 

 steady development in a continuous life without the loss of a terra from first 

 to last. 



Nearly all the Agricultural Colleges of the country, of which there is now 

 one to nearly every State, owe their origin to the Congressional grant of lands 

 for this purpose, made in 1863. Pennsylvania and Iowa, as well as our own 

 State, established their colleges before this grant of lands. As the first insti- 

 tution of the sort our college has been visited by officers or committees from 

 many other States, and has had considerable influence in the organization of 

 other institutions. The Presidents, and in several instances other officers also 

 of similar institutions in Maine, Massachusetts (three of them), New York 

 (President White and Mr. Ezra Cornell), Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, 

 Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Ontario, Kansas, Colorado have visited us, 

 and officers or committees from Virginia, Arkansas, Minnesota, Texas, 

 Oregon, California have visited us or have taken graduates for officers. The 

 several States have, of course, organized their college after their own plan; 

 but a curiosity naturally attached to the college that began the untried system 



* Hon. C. J. Monroe. 



