Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 540]

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Report of a Committee on Location of the University

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perintendents and all a " G d d d Humbug f \ Such was the spirit which animated the leading champions of Champaign in the house; and thus they fortified themselves and their allies against the report of their own committee, already expected to be adverse to their schemes; in due time the report was made. • They reported that the total value of property offered by Champaign County in cash was $285,000; that offered by Logan County was $385,000, that offered by McLean county, at $470,000 that offered by Morgan county at $491,000. Thus the cash value of the bid of Champaign was one hundred thousand dollars less than the lowest of the other bids, and more than $200,000 less than the highest bid, according to the showing of a joint committee of the house and senate, appointed solely to make and report a just estimate of the value of the property offered by each locality. But the Champaign ring were not found lacking in impudence, if they were in cash, they immediately went behind the report of the committee and published a new report of their own, placing their own value upon their own property, and disparaging that of Bloomington, and still affecting that theirs was the more valuable of the two. In their offer two years since they themselves appraised their building, all to be completed as it now is, with its ten acres of grounds, and one hundred acres of the adjacent lands, at only $130,000, and everyone knew it could not be sold for one-half that money. They afterwards added two blocks, and forty acres more, and appraised the value at $160,000, or at the rate of about $700 per acre or $30,000 for about forty acres additional land. At their first heat, for the session of 1867, they added seven hundred and twenty acres more of prairie land, and raised their valuation to $300,000, or $170,000 for seven hundred and twenty acres of land mostly two miles away in the prairie, known to be assessed at only from $12.00 to $15 per acre, and so declared in the report of the joint committee. Not a word was said in this offer about the $100,000 published as having been v§ted by the honest people of the county for the location of the ^niversit^g This bid already publicly proffered to the state at a value of thj^fc hundred thousand in their own published charter, before tfife