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Caption: Book - History of the University (Powell)
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Beginning Struggle for Industrial Education 7 state to establish an agricultural college and experiment farm. In his annual message to the legislature, January, 1849, Governor Hamilton Fish of New York recommended the endowment by the state of an agricultural college and a school for instruction in the mechanical arts. The agricultural society heartily approved this recommendation and under the presidency of John A. King, it presented during the year 1849, a valuable report to the legislature in which were embodied the outlines of a plan for instruction. It suggested the appoint* ment by .the governor of a board of commissioners to mature a plan for an agricultural college and experimental farm to be submitted by the governor to the legislature at its next session. The commissioners were appointed, the governor did his part, a house committee reported favorably but no action was taken on the bill. The friends of agricultural education were bitterly disappointed. In 1850 the matter was again urged and again the legislature solved the problem in a way satisfactory to itself by merely omitting all action. The year 1851 almost brought success—it seemed that the "great idea" was to be given a body at last. The people were heartily in favor, the farmers were becoming alive to the need of the proposed instruction; but again the bill was lost, defeated by a single vote.5 For a decade the New York agricultural society and the friends of agricultural education in the state had labored in the cause. And there was no more tangible evidence that they were nearer a state college or school of agriculture than when they had begun. The new instruction in subjects pertaining to agriculture was early present in the minds of the citizens of Massachusetts. An expression of this need is found as early as 1796 in the published proceedings of the Massachusetts society for promoting agriculture. By 1840 various private schools of secondary grade had been established for the teaching of agriculture. Some of them continued for many years to offer instruction in sciences that were able to help reveal the possibilities of the earth, but there was no college of agriculture. •IMA, 18: 632.
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