3G0 RURAL MWIIKIAN 



agcnient and farm machinery, cement construction 

 and use of the gas engine. The number of schools 

 conforming to the Smith-Hughes Law as applied in 

 Michigan increases annually, and was sixty-five in 

 1921." 



To prepare agricultural teachers and leaders, and 

 to diffuse knowledge of scientific agricultural prin- 

 ciples and processes among the farmers of the State, 

 the Michigan Agricultural College was opened in the 

 summer of 1857. In this departure from the then 

 accepted ideas of education, Michigan appears to 

 have taken the lead in this country. The project 

 had been broached at the inception of statehood, and 

 and for many years it was conceived proper to con- 

 nect agricultural education with the University of 

 Michigan. After its establishment in 1819, the 

 Michigan Agricultural Society had promoted the 

 project for a State school of agriculture, and the 

 State constitution of 1850, in one of its articles, 

 made provision for it. For a time the University 

 maintained a department of agriculture, but in 1855, 

 the legislature by law laid the legal basis for a sepa- 

 -rate institution and appropriated the State's salt 

 spriiig lands in aid of the venture. The executive 

 committee of the State Agricultural Society deter- 

 mined the site which was selected in the wilderness 

 three and a half miles east of the capitol at Lansing. 

 Its location without the agricultural zone of the 

 State, as it then was, did not give general satisfac- 

 tion, but all efforts to remove the institution to Ann 

 Arbor failed. The control of the College at first 



