Morrill Land-Grant Acts: Cornell's Timber Scrip and the Engineering Boom

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In the 1850s, American colleges taught Latin and Greek to a wealthy few, and West Point was the main path to an engineering education. Jonathan Baldwin Turner of Illinois College proposed funding practical schools with public land, and Michigan wrote an agricultural school into its 1850 constitution. Representative Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont introduced a land-grant bill in 1857 that passed in 1859, but President James Buchanan vetoed it. After Southern states seceded, Morrill added military tactics to the curriculum, and Abraham Lincoln signed the act on July 2, 1862, granting 30,000 acres per member of Congress, 17.4 million acres in all, to fund a $7.55 million national endowment.

States without enough federal land received scrip, and Ezra Cornell used New York's to claim Wisconsin timberland, so the state earned one third of all revenues with one tenth of the acreage. The episode lays out the source of that land: 10.7 million acres taken from 245 tribal nations through 162 violence backed cessions and treaties, divided into about 80,000 parcels. The Second Morrill Act of 1890 required former Confederate states to admit students regardless of race or fund separate Black land-grant schools, which both entrenched segregation and funded many of today's HBCUs. The Hatch Act of 1887 and the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 added experiment stations and county extension agents.

• The Hatch Act gave each land-grant college $15,000 a year for agricultural experiment stations.
• In 1866 the United States had only about 300 engineering graduates, all from six colleges.
• By 1911 the country was graduating 3,000 engineers a year, against 1,800 in Germany.
• A 1994 expansion added tribal colleges and universities to the land-grant system.
• Congress reused the model for Sea Grants in 1966, Urban Grants in 1985, Space Grants in 1988 and Sun Grants in 2003.