UIHistories Project: A History of the University of Illinois by Kalev Leetaru
N A V I G A T I O N D I G I T A L L I B R A R Y
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Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Nevins) [PAGE 262]

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244 UNIVERSITY AFTER IT FOUND ITSELF same purpose. This was a full two years after the experiment station had begun preaching the necessity of adding phosphates to the grain-worn soil of Illinois; but there was nevertheless a danger of misconstruction of the faculty's motives in continuing to urge the buying of the fertilizer. After discussing the matter with President and Trustees, the men involved severed their connection with the company. If the University had insisted with scant notice thirty years ago that it was "the State University," if under Draper it had made a sturdy attempt to realize this assertion, in the last decade it has taken its place with entire self-confidence as a great agency in State life. The full scope of its extension activities will be noticed later. JIBut the chief events in its progress in State service are to be recorded here. The agricultural departments have led the way. In 1907 the experiment station completed its first general survey of Illinois soils, and published the results. Detailed soil study was then undertaken, and has now covered half the counties of the State; and the acquisition of experimental plots all over the State, which had begun under Draper, went on rapidly. Three years later the college of agriculture began to give instruction at a boys* agricultural school conducted by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction at the State Fair at Springfield each autumn, over 200 registrants being admitted according to county allotment. The Farmer's Hall of Fame, instituted with the annual hanging of portraits of figures prominent in the State's agricultural history in the Auditorium by an agricultural committee, had then just been opened. At about the same time the Uniirsity began holding agricultural extension school^SR; different localities, there being forty of from one to six weeks' duration