 Hi, I'm Mary Cotrider and welcome to Boiler Bites. In celebration of Purdue University's 150th anniversary, we'll be featuring a segment in each Boiler Bites this year that takes a look at the giant leaps made in Purdue's past, present, and future. In this segment we go all the way back to the very beginning, the founding of Purdue University. Was there ever better spent money by the federal government? It was such an experiment and it was such a gamble. The ideals were there but nothing else. When you look at Purdue today and consider its modest beginnings, you can't help but feel like this is a promise fulfilled. The middle of the 19th century, of course, the 800-pound grill in the room was the coming of the Civil War. A lot of the war was really about what kind of a nation America wanted to be. This is a period of second industrial revolution and the great boom is the railroad boom. And we're moving west. The one thing the railroad's going to do is it's going to open up the west. People were moving from rural areas to cities to work in factories. There was an enormous need for bridges, for roads, for factories. Just as a matter of economic development, Americans were looking for an educational system that would prepare the leaders and the workers in that new industrial system. But there was absolutely no standardization of education. Most colleges were affiliated, tied to one religious denomination or another. At that time, it was the wealthy and the elite who went to college. Kids did not grow up with the expectation that they would go to college. And we think of someone like Abraham Lincoln, who studied law with a lawyer. I mean, he didn't go to a law school and get certified as a lawyer the way one would do that today. When I think of Morrell, you know, I think of a guy with some vision. Morrell was a senator from Vermont. He was part of the Whig Party. Those who adhered to the Whigs tended to believe that government had an important role to play. And so they were looking for programs that would contribute to the common good. Purdue was created by one of the most important pieces of legislation impacting education in all of our history, the Morrell Act. The idea of the Morrell Act is going to bring the government into this and the government is going to get into the education business. And the reason they wanted to do it in large extent was to help extend the ideals of education to a wider class of people. But with the proviso that these institutions of higher learning would focus on agricultural science and the mechanical arts. If the government's in the education business, they want to see a practical result coming out of the education. In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrell Land Grant Act. They're called land grant universities because states sold public land to raise money to start the universities. In the Big Ten, ten of the fourteen schools are land grant universities. Indiana got about $240,000 for the land that they sold out west. The whole idea of the land grant institution was not that the federal government was going to give you all your money. States were required to do the buildings and the infrastructure. They couldn't use that land grant money for that. Just so happened in the early 1860s, Indiana economy was not booming. Because Indiana, with its canal fever, had gone broke. They were all at bankrupt. They were trying to pay back the debts. They just didn't have the money to build the college. In the beginning of 1869, the governor of Indiana, Conrad Baker, went before the Indiana legislature and said, we cannot afford this university. We need another $240,000 in addition to what we have to open the doors. That created a bidding war to where the university was going to be located. Indiana University, of course, in Bloomington thought, well it should just be here. We already exist. We can add the necessary courses of study. This is where John Perdue will step up and say, look, if you build it where I want it built if it's named after me, I'll kick in $150,000, several million dollars by today's standards. Unlike the vast majority of land grant universities, Perdue stands out as bearing the name of one of the important contributors to its founding, John Perdue. John Perdue was born in 1802 on Halloween. Very poor family. And John Perdue struck out in his own as a young man in Ohio, south of Columbus. John Perdue saw how successful the canals were to the communities that went through. And he knew the Wabashinary Canal was going to go through Lafayette. He decided to relocate in the late 1830s to Lafayette. Lafayette was an interesting city. It was a great, burly, kind of Western town. Perdue was going to become very prosperous very quickly. And he got in the ground floor and he became very wealthy. It was a really booming community. So it was a place with promise. And I think that's what John Perdue saw when he first came. And when he made the pitch for this being the ideal location for the land grant school, other people could see that too. Perdue was officially established on May 6, 1869. Doesn't open stores till 1874. There were questions whether the doors were going to be open. And especially when it was decided to site it on the west bank of the river. People talked about it as a white elephant. There was nothing here. On the west side of the Wabash River at that time was a little town of Chauncey. It was only just, you know, less than a hundred homes. It was very small. Everything that was around here was in Lafayette. And it was centered on the canal and then the railroad and the transportation systems over there. And this seemed like such folly. They located where they did because that's where John Perdue was able to get the land very inexpensively. Remember, he said he would provide the state with 100 acres. In those early years in inventing a university, the Board of Trustees had a huge challenge. None of these people were educators. Not one of them. These are local businessmen. They're local politicos. These aren't people that come from a university environment. They hadn't found at other universities. And of course, in the midst of all of this, you have John Perdue who wanted to be a committee of one directing the traffic on all those decisions. John Perdue was a 19th century businessman. He did not have a Board of Directors. He had himself. He was in charge. And so there's a lot of debates. There's give and take. There's trying to figure out how we do this. Where are buildings supposed to go? What does the faculty look like? The Board really had a terrible time to figure all of this out. I won't say the miracle is that we open the doors up, but it's a singular achievement that we finally do. They opened the doors in the fall of 1874, September of 1874. Perhaps the seven faculty members were smiling, greeting their new class. They expected a large, large number of students to show up, about 39 did. That was a bit disappointing. And even more disappointing is once they were tested, only 13 were really qualified to go to a university. Well, they needed the other students, so they put them into what they called an academy or preparatory school. And that speaks, I think, to the condition of education in not just the state of Indiana, really pretty much in the whole United States. The campus at that time was just a couple of buildings. They had what they call a boarding house, which is where the faculty and their wives and children all lived. They had a classroom building. They had a workshop. They had a residence hall for male students. And they had a one-story wooden armory. The costs of going to Purdue in the early years were minimal. There was no tuition, but they did have fees they had to pay. And that totaled to about $20 for the year. In the early years of Purdue, there was a considerable amount of skepticism about what this land-grant institution would be about. It's hard to imagine what the folks in Lafayette, which was the going concern, thought about this little enterprise on the other side of the river. There were times when people were not sure if the university was going to really be able to stay in existence and to flourish. But I think there was generally enough of a sense across the state that such education was needed and such good people were coming out of Purdue University in the 1880s and 1890s, that it was an enterprise worth giving a chance. The supporters of the Morrill Act imagined in 1862 that we can educate the sons and daughters of the farmers and the middle class. I mean, look at what came out of this piece of legislation. Purdue University, Wisconsin, Michigan State, Ohio State, and on and on, some of the greatest, largest state universities in America, some of the best universities in the world. This is a world-class university that not only fulfilled the expectations of the founders of the land-grant, but took us to heights that they never imagined. To learn more about the 150 years of Purdue University history, you could read the newly published book, Ever True, 150 Years of Giant Leaps at Purdue University by John Norberg. That'll wrap up this edition of Boiler Bites. Remember that you can catch up on all our past stories at BoilerBites.com. See you next time.