Chapter XXIII
Historical Sketch of Cornell College
BY WILLIAM HARMON NORTON, ALUMNI PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY, CORNELL COLLEGE
Linn county may well take pride in the history of her oldest school of higher education, founded in 1853, when the county held but 6,000 people. But the beginnings of Cornell College are of more than local interest; they are thoroughly typical of America and of the West. Cornell was founded in much the same way as were hundreds of American colleges along the ever advancing frontier of civilization from Massachusetts to California--a way which the world had never seen before and will never see again.
THE FOUNDATION AND THE FOUNDER
Cornell owes its inception to a Methodist circuit rider, the Rev. George B. Bowman, a North Carolinian by birth, who came to Iowa from Missouri in 1841, three years after the territorial organization of the commonwealth. This heroic pioneer, resourceful, far seeing, and sanguine of the future, eminent in initiative and in the power of compelling others to his plans, was one of those rare men to whom the task of building states is intrusted. He was not himself a college man, but with him education was a passion. To found institutions of higher education he considered his special mission. Hardly had he been appointed as pastor of the church at Iowa City in 1841 when he undertook the building of a church school, called Iowa City College. In 1845 Rev. James Harlan, a local preacher of Indiana, was chosen president, and with one assistant opened the school in 1846. The next year Mr. Harlan was elected state superintendent of public instruction, and the college was closed never to be re-opened. It had at least served to bring to the state one of its most distinguished citizens, afterward to be honored with the United States senatorship and the secretaryship of the interior. Meanwhile Mr. Bowman had been appointed presiding elder of the Dubuque district, which then included much of east-central Iowa. The failure of the premature attempt at Iowa City had not discouraged him; he awaited the favorable opportunity he still looked for--suitable local conditions for a Christian college in the state. It is a long-told legend, even if it be nothing more than legend, that when Elder Bowman came riding on horseback to the Linn Grove circuit, he stopped on the crest of the lonely hill on which Mount Vernon now stands. From its commanding summit vistas of virgin prairie and primeval forest stretched for ten and twenty miles away. Here there fell upon him, the circuit preacher, the trance and vision of the prophet. He saw the far-off future; he heard the tramp of the multitudes to come. Dismounting, he kneeled down in the rank prairie grass and in prayer to Almighty God consecrated this hill for all time to the cause of Christian education. And it is a matter of authentic history that in the spring of 1851 Elder Bowman and Rev. Dr. A. J. Kynett, in the parsonage at Mount Vernon, planned together for the early founding and upbuilding of a Christian college on this site.
With the characteristic initiative of the Iowa pioneer, Bowman did not wait for authority to be given him by anybody, for articles of incorporation to be drawn up, or even for a title deed to the land on which the college was to stand. Early in 1852 he laid his plans for the launching of the school. On the Fourth of July of this year an educational celebration was held at Mount Vernon, which drew the farmers for miles about the town, and other friends of the new enterprise from Marion and Cedar Rapids, Anamosa, Dubuque, and Burlington. The oration of the day was delivered by State Superintendent Harlan on the theme of Education, and at its close ground was broken formally for the first building of the college. A month later a deed was obtained for the land and the following September the guardianship of the infant school was accepted under the name of the Iowa Conference Seminary, by the Methodist Episcopal church.
In this highly democratic manner Cornell College was founded by the people as an institution of higher learning, which should ever be of the people and for the people. It was born on the anniversary of the nation's natal day, and was to remain one of the highest expressions of patriotism and civic life. Christened by the head of the educational interests of the young commonwealth, supported by its citizens, protected by a charter from the state, and exempt as a beneficent institution of the state from contributing by taxation to the support of other institutions, the college was thus begun as a state school in a very real sense.
One can not read the early archives of the college without the profoundest admiration for the pioneers, its founders. Avid of education to a degree pathetic, they depended on no beaurocracy of church or state; they waited for no foreign philanthropy to supply their educational needs. They laid the foundations of their colleges with the same free, independent, self-sufficing spirit with which they laid their hearthstones, and they laid both at the same time.
THE IOWA CONFERENCE SEMINARY
In January, 1853, the first meeting of the board of trustees was held, and in the fall of the same year the school was opened in the old Methodist church at Mount Vernon. Before the end of the term a new edifice on the campus was so far completed that it was available for school purposes and "on the morning of November 14, 1853, the school met for the last time in the old church and after singing and prayer the students were formed in line and walked in procession with banners flying, led by the teachers, through the village, and took formal possession of what was then declared to be a large and commodious building."[J]
The first catalog--a little time-stained pamphlet of fifteen pages--lists the following faculty:
Rev. Samuel M. Fellows, A. M., professor of mental and moral science and belle lettres.
Rev. David H. Wheeler, professor of languages.
Miss Catherine A. Fortner, preceptress.
Miss Sarah L. Matson, assistant.
Mrs. Olive P. Fellows, teacher of painting and embroidery.
Mrs. Sophia E. Wheeler, teacher of instrumental music.
The first board of trustees is also noteworthy:
Rev. George B. Bowman, president, Mount Vernon; E. D. Waln, Esq., secretary, Mount Vernon; Rev. H. W. Reed, Centerville; Rev. E. W. Twining, Iowa City; Rev. J. B. Taylor, Mount Vernon; Jesse Holman, North Sugar Grove; Henry Kepler, North Sugar Grove; William Hayzlett, Mount Vernon; A. I. Willits, Mount Vernon.
The roster of students enrolls 104 gentlemen, and 57 ladies. Among them are familiar and honored names, some of which are to reappear in all later catalogs of the school, either as students of the second and third generation, or as trustees and members of faculty. Four Rigbys, for example, were students in 1853. In 1910 the catalog lists three Rigbys, one a student and two members of the faculty. The first catalog contains the names of no less than nine Keplers as students, six stalwart young men from North Sugar Grove and their three sisters. Four Walns are enrolled from Mount Vernon, two Farleys from Dubuque and two Reeders from Red Oak.
In 1853 the population of the entire state was only about 300,000. Not a railway had been projected west of the Mississippi river. And yet the scattered settlements sent across the unbroken prairie and the unbridged rivers no less than 161 students to the young school on this the first year of its existence. The most important route to Mount Vernon was the military road extending from Dubuque to Iowa City. Both towns contributed their quota of students, Dubuque sending no less than twelve, although the entire population of Dubuque county was then, less than 16,000. Considering the difficulty of communications, the poverty of the pioneers, the wide extent of the sphere of influence of the school is remarkable. Students were drawn this first year from as far to the northeast as Elkader and Garnavillo. They came from Dyersville and Independence, from Quasqueton and Vinton, from Marengo, Columbus City, West Liberty, and Burlington. Muscatine alone sent seven students. This town was at the time the point of supply for Mount Vernon, and the materials for the first building of the college except such as local saw mills and brick kilns could supply were hauled from that river port.[K] Students came also from Davenport, Le Claire, Princeton, and Blue Grass in Scott county, from Comanche, and from the pioneer settlements of La Motte and Canton in Jackson county. The eight hundred students of Cornell today reach the school from all parts of the state and the adjacent portions of our neighboring states by a few hours swift and comfortable ride by rail. But who shall picture in detail the long and adventurous journeys in ox cart and pioneer wagon and perchance often on foot of the boys and girls of 1853--the climbing of steep hills, the fording of rivers, the miring in abysmal sloughs, the succession of mile after mile of undulating treeless prairie carpeted with gorgeous flowers stretching unbroken to the horizon, the camp at night illuminated by distant prairie fires, until at last a boat shaped hill surmounted by a lonely red brick building lifts itself above the horizon, and the goal of the long journey is in view!
No doubt there were other hardships awaiting these students after their arrival. Rule No. 1 of the new school compelled their rising at five o'clock in the morning. They were expected to furnish their own beds, lights, mirrors, etc., when boarding in Seminary Hall. It is interesting to note that they paid for tuition $4.00 and $5.00 per quarter, and for board from $1.50 to $1.75 per week. The next year the steward's petition to the board of trustees that he be allowed to put three students in each of the little rooms was granted with the proviso "that he furnish suitable bunks for the same." The catalog's statement regarding apparatus is a guarded one: "The Institution is furnished with apparatus for illustrating some of the most important principles of Natural Science. As the wants of school demand, additions will be made to this apparatus." And that regarding the library is wholly prophetic: "It is intended to procure a good selection of readable and instructive books, by the commencement of the next academic year, to which the students will have access at a trifling expense. With these books as a nucleus, a good library will be accumulated as rapidly as possible. Donations of good books are solicited from friends of the institution." In the next catalog it is stated that "a small but good selection of readable and instructive books has been procured," the remainder of the statement being the same as that of the first year. This statement appeared without change in all succeeding catalogs during the remainder of the first decade.
THE FIRST DECADE
As early as 1855 the articles of incorporation were amended changing the name of the institution to Cornell College, in honor of W. W. Cornell and his brother J. B. Cornell, of New York City, men prominent in business and widely known for their benevolences to various enterprises of the church. It will be noted that Cornell College was thus named several years before the founding by Ezra Cornell, of Cornell University at Ithaca, N. Y.
The first year of the school under the new collegiate régime was that of 1857-1858. Rev. R. W. Keeler of the Upper Iowa Conference was made president, Principal Fellows of the Seminary taking the professorship of Latin. Two years later President Keeler reentered the more congenial work of the ministry, and Principal Fellows was elected president of the college, a position which he held most acceptably until his death on the day after commencement June 26, 1863, thus completing a full decade of years of service in the school.
President Fellows had come to Cornell from the Rock River Seminary at Mount Morris. His character and the quality of his work left lasting impressions on his pupils at both institutions. Thus Hon. Robert R. Hitt, of Illinois, writes of him as follows: "He was a diligent, acute, and active student, and his personal character was admirable. It is the fortune of few men to exercise so wide and prominent an influence from a position which, to the ambitious, is not considered eminent." And Senator Shelby M. Cullom has written: "I regard Professor Fellows as one of the best men I ever knew. I said it when I was under him at school, and now that I am over seventy years of age, I say it now. He was strong, honest-hearted, full of kindness, and a splendid teacher."
His colleague at Cornell, Dr. David H. Wheeler, described him as "a man sweet-spirited, pure-minded, of fine executive ability, a rarely qualified teacher, a patient sufferer, a tireless worker, a model friend."
A word may be said as to the members of President Fellows's faculty:
Miss Catharine A. Fortner, a graduate of Cazenovia Seminary, N. Y., was sent out in 1851 by Governor Slade, of Vermont, as a missionary teacher to Iowa. Her success near Tipton was so marked that she was chosen as the first preceptress of the institution. In 1857 she resigned to marry Rev. Rufus Ricker, of the Upper Iowa Conference.
Wm. H. Barnes, professor of languages in 1854-1855, resigned to accept a professorship in Baldwin University, Ohio, and is known as author of several works in history and politics.
His successor, Rev. B. W. Smith, after leaving the school in 1857 became pastor of several of the largest churches in northern Indiana, and president of Valparaiso College.
Dr. David H. Wheeler, professor of languages in 1853-1854, and professor of Greek from 1857 to 1861, when he was appointed U. S. consul to Genoa, was a brilliant and versatile man, author of a number of books, professor for eight years at Northwestern University, editor for eight years of the New York Methodist, and for nine years president of Allegheny College.
The brother of President Fellows, Dr. Stephen N. Fellows, has a large place in the educational history of Iowa. He assisted his brother in laying the foundation of Cornell College, being professor of mathematics from 1854 to 1860, and later occupied the chair of mental and moral science and didactics at the State University of Iowa for twenty years.
On account of her long connection with the college, from 1857 to 1890, Miss Harriette J. Cooke exerted a more potent influence on the institution than any of her colleagues of the first decade. Miss Cooke came to Cornell from Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and brought the best culture for women which New England then afforded, as well as an exceptionally forceful personality, and rare natural aptitudes for her profession. From 1860 to the time of her resignation she was dean of women, and her influence for good on the thousands of young women under her care is incalculable. After long service as an instructor she was made a full professor in 1871, the first woman in America, it has been said, to be thus honored. Her chair for fifteen years was history and German, and after 1886 history and the science of government. On leaving the college she studied the methods of deaconess work in England, wrote a book upon the subject, and returning to her native land became one of the leaders in this new department of social service. For many years she has been closely connected with the University Settlement of Boston. On the recent celebration of her eightieth birthday she received hundreds of letters of loving congratulation from her former students of Cornell, and each of these letters was answered by her painstakingly and at length.
The first ten years of the institution were marked by a singularly rapid growth, considering the fact that they included the darkest days of the Civil war, when nearly every male student was drawn from the college halls to the service of his country. At the end of the decade the faculty numbered eight professors and instructors, and 375 students were enrolled, fifty-one of whom were in college classes, the largest enrollment of collegiate students in the state, unless at the State University. The assets of the institution amounted to $50,000 in notes and pledges, a campus of fifteen acres, and two brick buildings which compared not unfavorably with other college buildings in the west and with the earlier halls of Harvard.
In a large measure this exceptional growth was due to Elder Bowman, to his initiative and wide and powerful influence. The chief problem then as now was one of sustenance, and as a college beggar Bowman was incomparable. He travelled over the settled portions of the state, winning men to his cause by a singular personal charm, and enticing even out of poverty money, promissory notes at altitudinous rates of interest, farm produce, live stock and poultry, household furniture and jewelry. His barnyard at Mount Vernon was continually stocked with horses, cattle, and chickens--votive offerings to the cause of higher education. A citizen of the town once told me how under some mesmeric influence he bought at high price from Elder Bowman an old book case and coal scuttle, begged somewhere for the school. This prince of college beggars once returned from Dubuque with a silver watch which he had plundered off the person of an eminent minister of that city.
FROM 1863 TO 1910--GROWTH IN RESOURCES
Nothing is so tame as the history of a college once the interesting period of its childhood is over, and the history of Cornell is exceptionally uneventful among colleges. No building has been destroyed by fire or tornado. No famous lawsuit against the school has been defended by some Webster among the alumni. None of the faculty has won notoriety by sensational speech or erratic morals.
The salient feature of the forty-seven years since 1863 is a marvelous growth unparalleled in some respects in the history of education. The campus has been enlarged by addition after addition until now it measures sixty acres, including the larger part of the long hill and wide athletic fields along its northern base. To the two first buildings, still used, one for the chemical, biological and physical laboratories and the other for class rooms and society halls, there have been added South Hall, built in 1873 and now used for the engineering and geological laboratories; the Chapel, completed in 1882, a stately Gothic structure of stone, containing the auditorium, seating about 1,500, a smaller audience room, the museum, and several music rooms; Bowman Hall, built in 1885, as the well appointed home of ninety-two young women; the library dedicated in 1905, the gift of Andrew Carnegie; the alumni gymnasium in Ash Park, built in 1909, a noble structure, one of the largest of the kind in the state, besides several minor buildings used for allied schools and professors's residences.
The material equipment has made a phenomenal growth, until several of the scientific laboratories are reckoned among the best in the Central West, and the library, numbering 35,000 volumes, ranks as third in size among the university and college libraries in the state, and second to but one of the city libraries of Iowa. The museum includes several collections which rank among the largest in the west: the Kendig collection of minerals, the Norton collection of fossils, and the Powers collection in American anthropology.
GROWTH IN ATTENDANCE
From the beginning Cornell has been a relatively large school measured by the number of its students, and its growth the last decades forbids it longer to be called a small college. Indeed, for many years it has maintained its place as the largest denominational college, or among the two or three largest, in the United States west of the Great Lakes, reckoned by the number of students of collegiate rank. The attendance has steadily risen until, in 1909-1910, 741 students were enrolled, 450 of them being in the college of liberal arts. The steady growth in numbers of collegiate students evidences the satisfaction which the school has given to its patrons, and an ever widening influence and power. Moreover, it has increased the efficiency of the school by the inspiration of numbers and the intensity of competition in all departments of college life. By bringing together students from all parts of the state and scores from other states, some with the polish of the city and others with the sturdy strength of the country, it has escaped the narrowness of the provincial and has attained something akin to cosmopolitanism.
To make Cornell an institution state-wide in its patronage and influence was the evident purpose of its founders. Nothing was further from their minds than a local college for the students of a town or county, or one drawing its patronage from a few contiguous counties. The trustees have been chosen widely over the state and the attendance from all parts of Iowa has been surprisingly large, considering the many excellent colleges the state supports. In an investigation made a few years since of the geographic distribution of the students it was found that 41 per cent of the collegiate students came from beyond the borders of the patronizing conference, and the counties west and south of the Des Moines river furnished 20 per cent of the students in attendance from the state. The college has thus grown to have a state-wide field.
THE STRATEGIC POSITION
In explaining the growth of Cornell college we must recognize, of course, that it has grown up with the country. We must relate the growth of the school directly to the material prosperity of this land of corn and swine, to the marvelously fertile soil and to the era of expansion in which our history falls. The fact remains, however, that the college has obtained somehow a good deal more than its due share in the general advance. While the population of the state increased 330 per cent from 1860 to 1900, the collegiate attendance at Cornell increased 720 per cent. The college has grown more than twice as fast as has the state, and that notwithstanding the numerous good schools which have sprung up to share its patronage.
We can not doubt that much of the success of the school has been due to its strategic position. It is located in a suburban town of the chief railway center of eastern Iowa. From Cedar Rapids long iron ways, like the spokes of a wheel, reach in all directions to the limits of the state and beyond, and bring every portion of the commonwealth and the adjacent parts of our neighboring states within a few hours ride of Cornell college. It is located also in east Central Iowa, an area of the state the first to be settled and developed, an area surpassed by none in the fertility of its soils, and the wealth which has been produced from them. To these geographic factors, advantages shared in like degree by none of the early competitors of the school, we may assign a place similar to that given such factors in explaining the growth of New York city and of Pittsburg.
While the college had thus had the city's advantages of communication and markets because of its nearness to Cedar Rapids, it has retained all the peculiar advantages which inhere in a location in a village. Like Bowdoin, Dartmouth, and Oberlin, Cornell has found in the small town, rather than in the city, an ideal college environment. It has never permitted the presence of saloon or other haunt of vice. The citizens with whom the students have made their homes have been people of culture drawn to the town by its educational advantages. In all that makes for the intellectual life, in libraries and collections, in lectures and good music, and church privileges, Mount Vernon has had more to offer than perhaps any city of the state; while the temptations and distractions, the round of low amusements offered by the city, have been fortunately absent.
THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES
More than geographic location, it is great men and great plans that make great schools. Let us give much credit therefore to the men who have administered the college as members of its board of trustees. Our debt to them is like that of Michigan University to its board of regents whose wise plans pushed it early to the fore among the state universities of the west and far in advance of the place to which geographic causes alone would have assigned it. Some of these were pioneers of only local fame, such as Elijah D. Waln, Henry D. Albright, William Hayzlett, Jesse Holman, Noah McKean, and Dr. G. L. Carhart, men whose memory will ever be cherished in Mount Vernon. Others were men of note in the early history of the state, such as Hon. Hiram Price, of Davenport, Jesse Farley, of Dubuque, and A. P. Hosford and W. H. Lunt, of Clinton. Especially to be noted is the long service which the trustees have given to the school. Of the members of the executive committee Col. Robert Smyth, sturdy Scotch Presbyterian, was a member for twenty-eight years until his death in 1896. On the same committee Hon. W. F. Johnston, of Toledo, long president of the board, has already served for thirty-three years. Col. H. H. Rood, another of the members of the executive committee, has served continuously as trustee since 1867, and Capt. E. B. Soper, of Emmetsburg, since 1878. Captain Soper has long been one of the most influential members of the governing board, and it is to his initiative and faith that the alumni gymnasium is due. Dr. J. B. Allbrook has served since 1874. H. A. Collin was treasurer of the college from 1860 to his death in 1892. Hon. D. N. Cooley, of Dubuque, served as trustee for twenty-four years, and Hon. W. J. Young, of Clinton, for twenty-six years, their terms of office being terminated only by death. Of the present board of trustees there may be named as among those longest in service, F. H. Armstrong, of Chicago; Hon. W. C. Stuckslager, of Lisbon; E. J. Esgate, of Marion; Maj. E. B. Hayward, of Davenport; Hon. Eugene Secor, of Forest City; Dr. Edward T. Devine, of New York; T. J. B. Robinson, of Hampton; John H. Blair, of Des Moines; Rev. W. W. Carlton, of Mason City; Rev. E. J. Lockwood and John H. Taft, of Cedar Rapids; Hon. Leslie M. Shaw, of Philadelphia; R. J. Alexander, of Waukon; E. B. Willix, of Mount Vernon; Senator Edgar T. Brackett, of Saratoga, N. Y.; O. P. Miller, of Rock Rapids; Rev. Homer C. Stuntz, of Madison, N. J. and N. G. Van Sant, of Sterling, Ill.
Among the eminent men who have served the college we must give special mention to Rev. Alpha J. Kynett, one of the pioneers of Methodism west of the Mississippi, who served on the board from 1865 to his death in 1899. Dr. Kynett was the founder of the great Church Extension society and for many years was its chief executive. In this capacity he probably built more churches than any man who has ever lived. For a third of a century he was a close friend and adviser of the college, and all his wide experience and his ability as an organizer and financier were always at its service.
THE ADMINISTRATION
In 1863 occurred the sad death of President Fellows, under whose superintendence the school had been organized. He was succeeded in office by William Fletcher King, a graduate of the Ohio Wesleyan University and a member of its faculty, who thus brought to Cornell an acquaintance with the scope and methods of one of the best colleges of the middle west. At the time of his election to the presidency Dr. King was professor of Latin and Greek at Cornell, and thus for the second time a president was chosen from the ranks of those actively engaged in the work of higher education rather than, as was then almost universally the custom, from those of another profession. In 1908 Dr. King resigned his office after a term of service of forty-five years. For a number of years he had thus been the oldest college president in the United States in the duration of his office. His administration was essentially a business administration, with little talk but much of doing. There was in it nothing spectacular, and no pretense, or sham. No discourteous act ever strained friendly relations with other schools. Dr. King made no enemies and no mistakes. He was ever tactful, poised, discreet, far-seeing, winning men to the support of his wise and well-laid plans but never forcing their acceptance. The college itself is a monument to this successful business administration. For Cornell does not owe its success to any munificent gifts. Like John Harvard, W. W. Cornell and his brother left the college which perpetuates their memories little more than a good name and a few good books. No donation of more than $25,000 was received until more than forty years of the history of the college had elapsed. Whatever excellence the college has attained is due to the skill and patience of its builders and not to any unlimited or even large funds at their disposal.
On the resignation of Dr. King, the presidency passed to his logical successor, Dr. James Elliott Harlan, who had served as vice president of the college since 1881. He had long had the management and investment of the large funds of the college and the administration of the school in its immediate relations with the students. Just, sympathetic, patient, he had won the esteem of all connected with the college, and to him was largely due the exceptional tranquillity which the college had enjoyed in all its intimate relations. Dr. Harlan was graduated from Cornell College in 1869. For three years he was superintendent of the schools of Cedar Rapids, and for one year he held a similar place at Sterling, Ill. From here he was called to the alumni professorship of mathematics in Cornell College. The larger part of his life has thus been bound up inextricably with the school. He knows and is known and loved by all the alumni and old students. The first year of his administration was signalized by the erection of the new alumni gymnasium, and the second by the conditional gift by the general educational board of $100,000.00 to its endowment funds.
The dean of the college since 1902 has been Professor H. H. Freer, a graduate of the school of the class of 1869, and a member of the faculty since 1870. Dean Freer was one of the first men in Iowa to see the need of schools of education in connection with colleges and universities and was placed at the head of such a school--the normal department of Cornell--early in the '70s. As has recently been said of him by Pres. H. H. Seerley, of Iowa Teachers College, "his connection with teacher education is probably unexcelled in Iowa educational history and no tribute that can be paid could do justice to his faithful endeavors." Dean Freer has been most intimately connected with the administration for many years. In 1873 he organized the alumni, with the help of Rev. Dr. J. B. Albrook, for the endowment of a professorship. At that time there were but 108 living graduates, forty-seven of whom were women. Of the men, only thirty-eight had been out of college more than three years. Yet this audacious enterprise was carried through to complete success and was followed by the endowment of a second alumni chair. In all of the great financial campaigns Dean Freer has been indispensible, and the moneys he has secured to the college amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. More than this, by his wide acquaintance throughout the state and by his cordial friendship with all old students, he has been one of the chief representatives of the college around whom its friends have ever rallied. Since 1887 he has been professor of political economy in the college, and now occupies the David Joyce chair of economics and sociology.
THE FACULTY
Of the nearly 300 teachers who have been enrolled in the faculties of the college there is space for the mention of but few names: Dr. Alonzo Collin, who began by teaching all the sciences and mathematics in the young school in 1860, and resigned in 1906 as professor of physics; Dr. Hugh Boyd, professor of Latin from 1871 to 1906; Prof. S. N. Williams, head of the school of civil engineering since 1873; Prof. George O. Curme, professor of German from 1884 to 1897, now a member of the faculty of Northwestern University; Dr. W. S. Ebersole, professor of Greek since 1892; Dr. James A. James, professor of history from 1893 to 1897, now teaching in Northwestern University; Prof. H. M. Kelley, professor of biology since 1894; Dr. Thomas Nicholson, professor of the English Bible from 1894 to 1904, now general educational secretary of the M. E. church; Dr. F. A. Wood, professor of German from 1897 to 1903, now member of the faculty of University of Chicago; Prof. Mary Burr Norton, alumni professor of mathematics, whose connection with the faculty dates from 1877; Dr. H. C. Stanclift, professor of history since 1899; Dr. Nicholas Knight, professor of chemistry since 1899; Dr. George H. Betts, psychology, who entered the faculty in 1902; Prof. C. D. Stevens, English literature, since 1903; Prof. C. R. Keyes, German, since 1903; Miss Mary L. McLeod, dean of women, since 1900; Prof. John E. Stout, education, since 1903.
The continuity, the long terms of service of the administrative officers and the professors, can hardly be too strongly emphasized as a potent factor in the growth of the college. If the history of the school had seen a rapid succession of different presidents and frequent changes of faculty, if there had been changes in plans and purposes, factions and struggles, and the loss of friends which such struggles entail, if the power of the machinery had been wasted in internal friction we may be sure that the story of the college would have been far other than it is.
THE ALUMNI
The graduates of Cornell now number 1,446. This small army of educated men and women have scattered widely over all the states of the union and to many foreign countries. They have entered many vocations. The profession receiving the largest number is teaching. Of the 1,139 graduates including the class of 1905, reported in the catalog of 1908, ninety-seven have been engaged in teaching in colleges and universities, and 165 in secondary and normal schools. One hundred and forty-nine have entered the law, and 139 have entered the ministry. Business and banking were the employments of 113. Medicine has been the choice of forty-nine, and engineering and architecture of fifty-two. The foreign missionary field has claimed thirty-four, and social service in charity organization societies, deaconess work, social settlements, and the Y. M. C. A. and the Y. W. C. A. have engaged twenty-six. Thirty-two have engaged in farming, and twenty-six in newspaper work. The women graduates of the school very largely have been induced to enter the profession of matrimony. Up to 1876, for example, ninety per cent of the alumnae had married. Of later years the larger opportunities for professional service, opening for women, and no doubt other general causes, have decreased the percentage, but of all women graduates up to the year 1900, seventy per cent have married. Of these forty-two per cent have married graduates of the college. The common error that college education lessens the opportunities of woman for her natural vocation is disproved, at least so far as Cornell college is concerned. The marriages of the graduates of Cornell have been singularly fortunate. Among the more than 1,400 alumni, there has been so far as known but two divorces. Considering the high percentages of divorce in the states of the Union, rising as high in some states as one divorce to every six marriages, the divorceless history of the Cornell alumni witnesses the sociologic value of the Christian co-educational college.
In numbers the graduating classes have steadily increased. The first class, that of 1858, consisted of two members, Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Cavanaugh, of Iowa City. Classes remained small, never exceeding five, until the close of the Civil war when the young men who had entered the service of their country, and who survived the war, returned to school. In 1867 eleven were graduated, and in 1869 the class numbered twenty-two. The last decade the graduating class from the college of liberal arts has averaged sixty.
CORNELL AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION
President Charles W. Elliot, in one of his educational addresses, after enumerating what the community must do for the college, asks, "And what will the college do for the community? It will make rich returns of learning, of poetry, and of piety, and of that fine sense of civic duty without which republics are impossible." That Cornell has made all these returns in ample measure is shown by the roster of the alumni with its many eminent names in the service of state and church. More than fifteen thousand young men and women have left the college halls carrying with them for the enrichment of the community stores of learning, poetic ideals of life, and vital piety. The fine sense of civic duty which the college breeds finds special illustration in the crisis of the Civil war, and here we may quote the eloquent words of Colonel Harry H. Rood in an address delivered at the Semi-Centennial of the college in 1904:
"The first seven and a half years in the history of this college was a period of struggle and embarrassment. The spring of 1861 seemed to be the beginning of brighter days. A railway had brought it in touch with the outer world, and the effects of the great financial panic of 1857 were passing, enabling the sons and daughters of the pioneers to enter its halls to secure the education they so greatly desired. The sky of hope was quickly overcast, and the storm cloud of the Civil war, which had been gathering for half a century, burst over the land. The students of Cornell were not surprised or alarmed. The winter preceding they had organized a mock congress with every state represented, in which all the issues of the coming conflict were fully discussed and understood.... The first regiment the young state sent out to preserve the Union had in its ranks a company from this county--one-third of the names upon its muster rolls were students from this school. The first full company to go from this township into the three years service had one-third of its membership from this college, and the second full company from the township, in 1862, also had an equal number of Cornell's patriotic sons. In the great crisis of 1864, when President Lincoln asked for men to relieve the veteran regiments and permit them to go to the front, almost a full company were college men. In the class of 1861 only two men were graduated and both entered the service.... The record shows that from 1853 to 1871 fifty-four men were graduated from the college, and of these thirty had worn the blue."
During the war the college had much the aspect of a female seminary to which a few young boys and cripples had been admitted by courtesy. In 1863 but twelve male students were registered in college classes, and at the commencement of this year all upon the program were women except a delicate youth unfit for war and a boy of sixteen years. This commencement was unique in the history of the college. On commencement day the audience of peaceful folk seated in the grove quietly listening to the student orations was suddenly transformed to an infuriated mob, when one girl visitor attempted to snatch from another a copperhead pin she was wearing. So strong was the excitement, that the college buildings were guarded by night for some time afterward for fear that they might be burned in revenge by sympathisers with the south.[L]
Near the close of the war it was seen that many of the soldier students of the college would be unable to complete their education because of the sacrifices they had made in the service of their country. A fund of fourteen thousand dollars was therefore contributed by patriot friends at home and in part by Iowa regiments in the field for the education of disabled soldiers and soldiers' orphans. No gift to the school has ever been more useful than this foundation, which aided in the support of hundreds of the most worthy students of the college.
Two of the students of Cornell were enrolled in the armies of the Confederacy. Of these one became a lieutenant in a Texas regiment. At one time learning that one of his prisoners was a Cornell boy and a member of his own literary society, the Texas lieutenant found Cornell loyalty a stronger motive than official duty. He took his prisoner several miles from camp, gave him a horse and started him for the Union lines.
THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
From the beginning Cornell college has been coëducational. In the earliest years of her history some concessions were made in the courses of study to the supposed weakness of woman's intellect, and "ornamental branches," such as "Grecian painting," which seems to have been a sort of transfer work, "ornamental hair work and wax flowers" were grafted on the curriculum for her special benefit--branches which soon were pruned away.
Woman's presence seems to have been regarded in these early years as a menace to the social order, safely permitted only under the most rigorous restrictions. So late as 1869 Rule Number Twelve appeared in the catalog--"The escorting of young ladies by young gentlemen is not allowed." This was a weak and degenerate offspring of the stern edict of President Keeler's administration:
"Young ladies and gentlemen will not associate together in walking or riding nor stand conversing together in the halls or public rooms of the buildings, but when necessary they can see the persons they desire by permission."
For many years these blue laws have been abrogated, and the only restrictions found needful are those ordinarily imposed by good society. The association and competition of young men and women in all college activities--an association necessarily devoid of all romance and glamour--has been found sane and helpful to both sexes, and no policy of segregation in any form has ever been as much as suggested.
The social life of the college has always been under the leadership of the literary societies. They are now eight in number: The Amphictyon, Adelphian, Miltonian and Star for men and the Philomathean, Aesthesian, Alethean and Aonian for women. The students of the Academy also sustain four flourishing societies, the Irving and Gladstone, Clionian and King.
These societies meet in large and rather luxuriously furnished halls in which they entertain their friends each week with literary and musical programs, followed by short socials. Business meetings offer thorough drill in parliamentary practice and often give place to impromptu debates which give facility in extemporaneous speaking. The societies also give banquets and less formal receptions from time to time and in general have charge of the social life of the school. Members are chosen by election and the rushing of the incoming freshman class is a fast and furious campaign, occupying a week or so of the first half-year. However it may affect studies, it certainly develops friendships and promotes the rapid assimilation of the large number of new students in the body social of the school.
The societies have always been in effect fraternities and sororities so far as social advantages are concerned, and they have performed the function of the best fraternities in the intellectual and moral supervision which they have given their members. But the literary societies have been more than fraternities, and under their supervision the social life of the college has been lived on a distinctly higher plane than had its organization been purely social and for recreation only. They have also been markedly distinguished from fraternities in their democratic character. Instead of excluding fifty or even seventy or eighty per cent of the students from their privileges, they have given their inestimable social advantages to practically all who cared to join them. They have thus prevented the growth of a leisured class of students whose sole interest in college is found in its recreations and who have been allowed the control of the college social life. Indeed, so valuable in the history of the college has this social organization proved that students have suggested that it be extended to other colleges by means of affiliated chapters.
ENDOWMENTS
During the earlier years of its history the college received few notable gifts. It was largely sustained by innumerable small contributions to its current expenses and endowment funds made by devoted friends whose generosity and self sacrifice deserve the praise bestowed upon the widow who cast her mite into the treasury of the temple. The larger gifts which have been made in endowing chairs, with the amounts and dates of the foundation and names of the donors, are as follows:
1859 Hamline Professorship of Greek Language and Literature, $25,000, by Bishop L. L. Hamline.
1873 D. N. Cooley Professorship of Civil and Sanitary Engineering, $10,000, by Hon. D. N. Cooley, Dubuque, and Oliver Hoyt.
1873 Alumni Professorship of Mathematics, $50,000, by The Alumni.
1885 W. F. Johnston Professorship of Physics, $50,000, by Hon. W. F. Johnston, Toledo.
1902 Edgar Truman Brackett, Jr., Professorship of History and Politics, $30,000, by Hon. Edgar T. Brackett, Saratoga, N. Y.
1904 David Joyce Professorship of Political Economy and Sociology, $50,000, by David Joyce, Clinton.
1904 Lucy Hayes King Foundation, now in support of the presidency, by ex-president Wm. F. King, $50,000.
1910 Alumni Professorship of Geology, $50,000, by The Alumni.
Among the other notable gifts to the college must be mentioned that by the Hon. Andrew Carnegie, of $50,000 for the erection of the Carnegie library, dedicated in 1905.
The largest donations to the college have been those of its president emeritus, William Fletcher King. Most valuable of all have been the long years of service, but besides these he has given from time to time many financial gifts to meet current needs and near the end of his term of office, he crowned his benefactions not only with the endowment of the professorship just mentioned, but with the munificent gift of $100,000 to found 100 scholarships in memory of Margaret Fletcher King. At the unveiling of the bronze tablet in her memory, in 1904, Hon. L. M. Shaw spoke these fitting words: "It is my privilege to witness the unveiling of a tablet erected in memory of a saintly woman who came in bridal clothes and left in cerements, and who spent the entire thirty-eight years of her married life wedded as completely to Cornell college as to William F. King, and who served both with equal faithfulness and with unfaltering devotion. Words are inadequate to measure the influence of a Christian woman's life spent amid surroundings such as have existed here for a generation. Neither does bronze suffice to prophesy the lift toward righteousness and higher citizenship of what is here done by the bereaved husband in the name of Margaret McKell King.... The tablet so thoughtfully erected to her memory and the endowment of scholarships so generously made by Dr. King guarantee the perpetuation of the sweet influence of a noble life and extend the benison of Christian education to one hundred students per annum, on and on, far beyond the ken of those who knew her and knowing loved her."
In 1910 the general education board made a conditional gift to the college of $100,000 for endowment, and of the $300,000 to be secured to meet the conditions nearly half has already been promised in sums among the largest ever given to the school.
THE CURRICULUM
In the fifties Cornell college was a very simple organization. In the first year of the college as distinct from the seminary, six teachers taught the entire round of the college course, which then included but forty subjects, each pursued for but three months. Besides Latin, Greek and mathematics, there were offered six terms in science and seven in the following subjects: Natural Theology, Evidences of Christianity, Moral Science, Butler's Analogy, Mental Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Elements of Criticism. This simple curriculum was stated by the catalog to embrace "the course of study in Mathematics, Languages, Sciences, and Belle Lettres which is prescribed in the best colleges and universities. It is thorough, extensive and systematic." All the same, both Cornell and "the best colleges and universities" have found that college courses could be made more "thorough and extensive" if not "more systematic." Latin, for example, at Cornell now offers eleven half-year courses instead of nine third-year courses as in 1857-1858. Sciences, which then offered six terms, now offer thirty-seven half-years and form five strong departments with their own professors and assistants. In 1875 the department of English Literature was organized, and the same year special teachers were employed for the first time in public speaking, although the School of Oratory was not organized until 1891. History and Politics became a distinct department in 1886. Courses in the English Bible were offered in 1894, and in Sociology in 1900. In all, the last catalog lists more than two hundred half-year collegiate courses of study.
The college has been among the foremost in the west in adapting and enlarging its courses to meet changing ideals. As early as 1873 the department of Civil and Sanitary Engineering was organized, in which hundreds of young men have received a valuable equipment for the work of life. One of the earliest recognitions of education as a collegiate subject was when courses in this science were offered at Cornell in 1872--the beginning of the present strong school of education. In 1900 and 1901 special directors of Physical Training for both men and women were first employed.
SPIRIT AND INFLUENCE
During all these changing years since 1853 the spirit of Cornell has remained essentially the same. It has made for scholarship--a scholarship honest, tireless, and fearless in the search for truth; it has cherished culture; it has fitted for service and has sent forth its students to perform, in the words of Milton, "justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the duties both public and private of peace and war." It has ever been a religious spirit, too, this spirit of Cornell, and kindling in thousands of young hearts has inspired them to purer, stronger, and more helpful living.
The influence of Cornell may be summarized by a quotation from an editorial in the Cedar Rapids Republican in 1904, reviewing the history of the college:
"Fifty years of college work and college building; what does it mean? What is it these men, about whom we have been writing, have done? The half can not be told. No research, however painstaking, could discover it all, for only a portion of such work is ever seen of men. For fifty years a constant stream of beneficent influences has been flowing out from this institution. The pure water which gushes from a spring on the hillsides, who can trace? A certain portion will refresh those who dwell near its source. The remainder flows away to form a brooklet that 'joins brimming river' which carries ships, waters cities, and finally augments an ocean current that washes illimitable shores. But for these springs the everlasting ocean would dry up. The stream of beneficent influences which has been flowing from this institution on the hillside down yonder, has been carried around the world--into countless fields of human activity and high endeavor--into homes where mothers teach their children to avoid those things that are of the earth earthy--into business establishments where the golden rule is not always turned toward the wall--into legislative halls where statesmen and patriots are needed--into the judiciary of state and nation--into the cabinet of the president of the United States--into all callings and all professions--into all countries and all climes. May it flow on forever and forever!"
Chapter XXIV
History of Coe College
BY REV. E. R. BURKHALTER, D. D.
There is an interest, and a charm peculiarly its own in tracing a stream that has grown to be a river back to its head waters in some lake or mountain spring. And when instead of a river we trace backward a college to its source and fountain head, this interest and charm come to possess a sacred value and are full of hallowed associations. And the charm and interest become complete when this matter is pursued by one who is not only a historian but also a participant in the transactions which cover years of time and call up many holy and tender memories of scenes and places, and yet more, of persons who were fellow-workers in the good cause and the most of whom have passed from earth.
The fountain head of Coe College, whose history it is now proposed to record, is to be sought and found in the mind and heart of the Rev. Williston Jones, the pioneer pastor of Cedar Rapids, who for the years between 1849 and 1856 was the minister of the First Presbyterian church of this city. Mr. Jones was a most zealous servant of his Divine Master, and labored zealously for His cause, not only in the local field, which was then so newly opened for settlement, but in the whole outlying region. His heart felt the needs of this entire middle west, which, as a fertile wilderness, was offering such inducements for the pioneer settler, and he longed to do his part to the utmost in assisting to provide this region with a gospel ministry. To this end, he opened a School of the Prophets in his own home.
We now avail ourselves at this early point of our history of the valuable contributions furnished by the words of the Rev. George R. Carroll, in his most interesting little volume entitled Pioneer Life in and Around Cedar Rapids, 1839-1849.
"Mr. Jones had persuaded one young man, the writer of this sketch, to devote his life to the gospel ministry. But there was no school here in which he could begin his studies. At last the zealous pastor decided to undertake himself the task of preparing that young man for college. Meantime, other young men heard of the arrangement, and persuaded Mr. Jones to admit them also to the same privileges. The result was the formation of a class of sixteen or eighteen young men who occupied the unfurnished parlor in the pastor's house, which was temporarily fitted up for the purpose. One of the number was chosen to act as monitor each week, and Mr. and Mrs. Jones came in at different hours of the day to hear the recitations in the various branches of study pursued. The branches studied were reading, writing, geography, arithmetic, Latin and Greek. This school continued its regular sessions for about six months, and was successfully wound up with a public exhibition under the shade trees in front of the pastor's residence on the hill near the Milwaukee depot. The following young men were among the students of that first school: George Weare, John Stony, Cyrus E. Ferguson, Murry S. D. Davis, Amos Ferguson, Isaac W. Carroll, Mortimer A. Higley, William E. Earl, William J. Wood, Edwin Kennedy, George R. Carroll, James L. Bever, and George W. Bever."
We also avail ourselves of an extract from the Fortieth Anniversary First Presbyterian Church, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1887, on which occasion Mr. Carroll in his biographical sketch of the Rev. Williston Jones, our first pastor, used the following language:
"Mr. Jones was deeply interested in the subject of raising up a native ministry. That is to say, he believed that it was important that we should seek out young men from among the people of the west to labor in the west. It was, therefore, his constant aim wherever he met a Christian young man of any promise, to lay before him the claims of the gospel ministry, and urge him prayerfully to consider the question as to whether or not God had called him to the sacred office. This fact, of course, led him to take a great interest in the subject of education. There were no schools at that time where a young man could even begin a course of study for the ministry. He felt the embarrassment of the situation. He had at last found one young man who had decided to study for the ministry, but there was no school in Cedar Rapids where he could make a beginning of the study of Latin or Greek or any of the higher branches of study. At last he decided to undertake himself the task of preparing that young man for college. In a short time, a dozen or fifteen more, hearing of this arrangement, begged the privilege of joining that lone student in studying under Mr. Jones, and before he was aware of it, he found himself at the head of a school for young men. This was in the autumn of 1851. He had erected for himself, meantime, a house of the same material of the old church, cement. It still stands on the hill north of the Milwaukee depot. The parlor of that house was at that time unfinished. It was lathed but not plastered. Mr. Jones said to the young men, if they would get one coat of plastering put onto that room, and put in some temporary seats made of slabs, they could have the use of it for a school room. The offer was promptly accepted, and, in due time, the school began in good earnest. One of the number would act as monitor in the school-room for a week, and then another, until the honor had been enjoyed by all. Mr. and Mrs. Jones were the first professors of the institution, coming in at regular hours to hear recitations. The branches of study pursued in the new academy were reading, writing, geography, arithmetic, algebra, grammar, Latin and Greek. Due attention was also given to composition, declamation, and vocal music. For six months that school continued in perfect harmony and marked success. The term closed sometime in June, I think 1852, with public exercises appropriate to the occasion. The place of meeting was in a grove immediately in front of the school-room. The order of exercises, as nearly as I can remember, consisted in singing and prayer of course, recitations, reading of essays, and declamations. Everything passed off pleasantly and satisfactorily, and I believe the school was pronounced a success. This effort convinced Mr. Jones more than ever of the need of a permanent school of a higher order. He therefore wrote on to Knox college, I think to Professor Blanchard, to see if one of the graduates could not come and take charge of the school. The result was that Mr. David Blakely, then a recent graduate of Knox college, came in the fall of 1852 and opened the school in the church. The school then assumed the name of the Cedar Rapids Collegiate Institute. Mr. Blakely held the position of principal of that school for two years, and then resigned his position to enter the active work of the gospel ministry, in which he is still engaged. During all this time the school was kept up with unabated interest, many students coming in from the country round about, and several from remote parts of the state. At least three of the members of that school entered the ministry, and are still engaged in the active duties of the sacred calling: one. Rev. Hiram Hill, in California; another, Rev. William Campbell, in Kansas; and the third in this state. It was during the spring of 1853, I think, that Mr. Jones was sent as a commissioner to the General Assembly (N. S.) which met in Buffalo, N. Y. During his absence the school at home occupied his thoughts and called out all the energies of his ardent nature. He determined if possible to secure aid in the east by which to place the school upon a permanent basis, having for its chief end the education of indigent young men for the gospel ministry. He was not disappointed in his purpose. Guided no doubt by an all-wise Providence, he met Mr. Daniel Coe, who listened to his earnest appeal, and gave him the money with which the eighty acres of ground, where the college now stands, and these two lots now occupied by this church and chapel, and a lot now occupied by the M. E. church, were secured, Dr. J. F. Ely making the purchase. You will see then, that out of the little school, started in the first pastor's house, has grown Coe college, and Rev. Williston Jones was its founder."
It can thus be easily seen that the yearning of Mr. Jones to see a school provided in Cedar Rapids was a fire in his bones. And so, when in the providence of God, he was in attendance at a meeting of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian church (New School) which was held in May, 1853, in the city of Buffalo, N. Y., he sought to interest everyone whom he met in the cause of Christian education in the west. At that same session of the General Assembly was a minister of the Presbyterian church from the Catskill mountain region of New York state. He said to Mr. Jones, in substance. "I cannot help you myself, but I believe I know a man in my section of the country who can and will, and if you come home with me to Durham, Greene county, New York, I will introduce you to him." The man alluded to was Mr. Daniel Coe, an elder of the church, already deeply interested in the cause of Christian education and preparing to help according to his ability when the suitable opportunity was afforded.
Mr. Jones went to Durham and met Mr. Coe, and presenting to him the matter nearest to his heart, the founding of a school of christian learning in the new world beyond the Mississippi. Mr. Coe gladly consented to assist in the enterprise. The sum promised, $1,500, would be considered in these days a very meagre one, but in 1853, and in Iowa, it must have seemed like $15,000 or more would seem now to us, and Mr. Jones must have welcomed the proffered aid with delight.
When he returned to his home in Cedar Rapids and to his brethren of the Presbytery of Iowa City, of which he was a member, he made such encouraging statements concerning the treatment he had received at the General Assembly, and especially concerning the offer of Mr. Coe, that there was formed in Cedar Rapids a corporation by the name of the Cedar Rapids Collegiate Institute, which prepared articles and filed them for record August 9, 1853. All persons owning one share of stock each in the Institute became thereby members of the corporation, each share of stock being of the value of $25.00. Article twelve of the fourteen articles of corporation reads as follows:
"The Iowa City Presbytery in consideration of five scholarships for the first five years, and of ten scholarships thereafter, shall have the right to nominate all teachers of the Institute, subject, however, to confirmation by the Board of Directors, but this right shall be forfeited if said consideration should at any time fail."
There is no reason to suppose from the records that this consideration was ever fulfilled.
Article thirteen gives the names of the directors: Williston Jones, John F. Ely, W. W. Smith, Seymour D. Carpenter, Addison Daniels, Isaac Cook, William Greene, John L. Shearer, and Aaron Van Dorn; and the following persons as officers of the board: George Greene, president; Samson C. Bever, treasurer; David Blakely, secretary.
It is very interesting to note that of these persons there is one who survives to this day, Mr. W. W. Smith, who at a very advanced age still lives at Minneapolis.
The first meeting of this board of directors was held July 18, 1853, and it was at that meeting that Mr. Jones presented the instrument of writing signed by Daniel Coe, of the county of Greene, in the state of New York, making a conditional donation to the Institute of the sum of $1,500, of which the following is a copy:
"CONDITIONAL DONATION TO CEDAR RAPIDS COLLEGIATE INSTITUTE
"Know all men by these presents that I, Daniel Coe, of the town of Durham, County of Greene, and State of New York, in view of the educational wants of the great and growing West, and in expectation of its resulting in the establishment of a permanent institution of learning, do hereby engage to give in behalf of Iowa City Presbytery, connected with the constitutional General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church which met at Buffalo, May 19th, 1853, to Cedar Rapids Collegiate Institute the following sums for the object hereinafter specified, to-wit: Four Hundred and twenty-five Dollars ($425.00) for the purchase of as large and suitable tract of land as practicable as a site for the location of the institute. And Seventy-five Dollars ($75.00) for fencing of the same. Also One Thousand Dollars ($1000.00) to be appropriated in the best manner for a farm contiguous to the site, the avails of which are to be appropriated to the best advantage for the benefit of such students as may need to assist themselves by manual labor. Of these two sums the first mentioned, consisting of Five Hundred Dollars ($500.00), can be secured to the Institute as a part of its property by the erection upon its site thus purchased of a building costing at least Two Thousand Dollars ($2000.00), and the last mentioned One Thousand Dollars ($1000.00) can be thus secured by bringing the Institute into successful operation. Provided that if these conditions fail, or if the Institute be removed or diverted from its original design, either or both of these donations shall be forfeited, and the land purchased shall revert back to the said Daniel Coe, his heirs, executors, or administrators.
"Dr. John F. Ely, Hon. George Greene, Dr. S. D. Carpenter, Isaac Cook, Esq., James Ferguson, and Williston Jones are hereby authorized to act for me in the selection and purchasing for said Institute the above mentioned site and farm, and are to draw on me for the money; of which sum Seven Hundred Dollars ($700.00) can be drawn at any time, and the remaining Eight Hundred Dollars ($800.00) one year from the date of this engagement.
"It is my strong desire that this Institute should be made available for the education of females as well as males."
It is evidently to be seen that it was the purpose of Mr. Coe to enable the directors of the Cedar Rapids Collegiate Institute to maintain a school of learning to be conducted in a building within easy access to the town, and at the same time aid such students as needed assistance through the products of the farm purchased on the edge of the town. Steps were taken at once to procure two sites, one for the school building, the other for the farm. And after considerable inquiry and debate, two sites were chosen and purchased: the one for the school building consisting of the two lots on which the First Presbyterian church of this city now stands and has stood since 1869; the other for the farm, consisting of a plot of eighty acres, of which the present campus of Coe College of ten acres, is the southwestern extremity.
The town lots were purchased for $275.00. The eighty acres were bought for $1000.00. These eighty acres were obtained from Mr. Otho S. Bowling by Dr. John F. Ely, who bought them with Mr. Coe's money for the Cedar Rapids Collegiate Institute. The date of the purchase is December 5, 1853. Mr. Bowling had obtained the land at the price of $820.00 from the executors of the estate of Mr. Joshua Phillips, of Franklin county, Pennsylvania. Mr. Phillips had died at his residence in Pennsylvania at some time between the 15th of December, 1852, and the 4th of January, 1853, and he had himself obtained the property in Cedar Rapids by patent from the United States government May 1, 1848. So that the plot of ground which figures in such a vital manner in the history of Coe College had passed through but two hands before being transferred to the Collegiate Institute from the government which had obtained it from the Indians.
It has also appeared that it was the wish of Mr. Coe and the design of the directors of the school that the building to cost $2000.00 should be erected as soon as practicable upon the town lots. But the erection of this building was delayed for various causes and especially in consequence of the lack of funds. Meanwhile, a school of very elementary character was maintained in the building used as their house of worship by the First Presbyterian church, and Mr. David Blakely was obtained as principal at a salary of $400.00 per annum, payable quarterly.
As time went on it was found to be more difficult than seemed probable in the beginning, to obtain subscriptions for the erection of the building of a school of just the character that seemed within the feeble means of the directors. And it became even more difficult, if not impossible, to maintain the school in the building occupied by the Presbyterian church. For it would appear that this community of Cedar Rapids was in process of organizing a general public school system, and no place seemed to exist for a parochial school of the elementary character that was then being conducted by the Cedar Rapids Collegiate Institute, at least in so small a community and one so feebly provided with material funds.
Therefore, through the want of proper sustenance, everyone connected with the Institute and notably the principal upon whom the chief burden fell became wholly discouraged and the Presbytery of Iowa City, that had a certain relationship to the school and interest in its success, proposed to put the school on wheels and offer it to the highest bidder, naming several localities among which were: Vinton, Waterloo, Lyons, Cedar Falls, Newton, and Iowa City.[M]
It will surely be of interest to learn [See Minutes Iowa City Presbytery, Mt. Vernon, February 4, 1857] that the citizens and proprietors of Comanche offered a site and subscriptions to the amount of $10,000, or $200.00 more than any other town, for the location of the Collegiate Institute of the Presbytery. Vinton also made a strong bid for the school and hoped to capture it, and might have done so had it not been that the eighty acre plot of ground, which was the only financial asset of the institution, was securely fastened down in Cedar Rapids, and Mr. Coe hesitated as to the propositions for the removal of the school.
But these internal and external discussions acted in a very unfavorable manner upon the Institute, and led to the winding up of its affairs, for there is no record of any meeting of its board of directors subsequent to July 26, 1859.
Meanwhile, a new star of hope arose in the heavens, and for several years at least it was a star of considerable brilliancy. It was made known, namely, that the will of Mr. Lewis Baldwin Parsons, a benefactor and philanthropist, and who died in Detroit, Michigan, December 21, 1855, after a successful life as a manufacturer in Buffalo, N. Y., contained a bequest setting aside a very considerable amount of money to found a Presbyterian college in Iowa. It could not be a matter of surprise, therefore, that the brethren in Cedar Rapids, who had struggled so hard to found a college with Mr. Coe's donation, and who had been so sorely disappointed, should now with enthusiasm welcome the thought that the Parsons legacy might be located here and be added to the Coe donation, and thus become the foundation of a strong college in Iowa in connection with the Presbyterian church. Accordingly, steps were taken to incorporate a new body of stockholders into an organization to be known as Parsons Seminary. The date of the first meeting with this end in view is November 10, 1866, and the following persons were chosen to serve as officers until the annual meeting in December: Rev. James Knox, president; Hon. George Greene, vice-president; Dr. John F. Ely, secretary; and Mr. S. C. Bever, treasurer.
At the annual meeting, December 3, 1866, the following officers were chosen: George Greene, president; James Knox, vice-president; John F. Ely, secretary; W. W. Walker, treasurer.
It was resolved immediately that Mr. Coe should be requested to deed to the new organization the eighty acres of land already donated by him to the Cedar Rapids Collegiate Institute, and at a meeting of the board of trustees of Parsons Seminary, held January 4, 1867, Judge Greene, president of the board, reported that he had visited Mr. Daniel Coe at his home in Durham, N. Y., and had procured from him the deed to Parsons Seminary of the land in question.
This most generous act of Mr. Coe reveals the large and unselfish character of the man and declares the nobility of his motive to promote the cause of high christian education in the west.
This act of Mr. Coe also gave great encouragement to the board of trustees of the seminary to proceed in their work, and they proceeded vigorously to raise what must in those days have been a considerable sum of money, for the purpose of erecting a suitable building for college purposes upon the edge of the eighty acre plot nearest to the town. The two town lots which had originally been purchased for the location of the school building were sold to the trustees of the First Presbyterian church, to become the site of a house of worship, which building was erected by them in 1869, and still stands a substantial edifice of stone, facing the public square long known as Washington Park, now George Greene Square.
The ways and means and plans for this new building occupied the attention of the board for many meetings during the years 1867 and 1868, and the work was pushed with all vigor to enable the trustees to open their seminary in the new building in the fall of 1868.
Meanwhile, the school work was inaugurated, pending the erection of the building on the college grounds, in the Wadsworth block, a row of unpretentious buildings resembling a barracks, on Second street and Fifth avenue, in the school year 1867-8. The principal of this school was the Rev. A. B. Goodale, a Presbyterian clergyman who survived in southern California until a few years ago.
Mr. Charles J. Deacon, our highly esteemed and greatly respected fellow citizen, who has spent a long and useful life among us, as an attorney, and who has been for several years a most valuable trustee of Coe College, was one of the first students of Parsons Seminary, and he has furnished us the following reminiscences which we gladly incorporate in this historical sketch:
"I came to Cedar Rapids and enrolled as a student in Parsons Seminary early in September, 1868. The school had been in progress under that name for a year previous, but then for the first time entered into the new building, now the west half of the main building of Coe college. This school was then prosperous and the body of students very enthusiastic. Dr. A. B. Goodale was the principal and Prof. Augustus Maasburg was the professor of Latin, Greek, French, and German. Miss A. D. Kelsey, a graduate of Mt. Holyoke, and a most estimable lady, had charge of the primary department, and also taught many of the classes in mathematics, and had charge of the botany class. Miss Lindsay, a sister of Mrs. Goodale, taught painting and drawing. A few weeks after the school opened, Professor and Madame Masurier came, and Professor Masurier took charge of the music, and Mme. Masurier was given the care of the French class. I remember also that Miss Addie Goodell, now Mrs. Birdsall, of Lake City, Iowa, was a student in the seminary, and it became necessary to have an assistant in the primary department, and she was employed in that capacity.
"At the beginning of the year 1868-1869 the school numbered over one hundred students. They were, of course, largely from the city of Cedar Rapids, but they came also from the surrounding towns of Fairfax, Springville, Center Point, Central City, and some from the farms within a few miles of the city. They came also from Vinton and Marengo, and some from more distant portions of the state, and I remember two from the state of Illinois, and one from Nebraska.
"The school year was divided into four terms of ten weeks each, the tuition being $7.50 per term. I remember there was some falling off in the attendance at the close of the second term in mid-winter. In the spring we were told that Dr. Goodale would have an assistant in the person of Mr. J. W. Stephens. When he came he was introduced to us by Dr. Goodale as his assistant, but it soon developed that he was the principal of the seminary, Doctor Goodale having about that time accepted the pastorate of the Presbyterian church at Marshalltown. The attendance at the spring term under the conduct of Dr. Stephens was much smaller than in the fall, but the school continued until the 20th of June, when it closed for the summer vacation. It issued a catalogue as it had the previous year and announced the opening for the following September.
"I returned to the school in the fall when it opened for the third year, being the second year in the new building, and found many of the old students. The school, however, was much smaller than at the opening of the previous year. It also dwindled very much during the year, and when we closed in June, 1870, my recollection is that it numbered about forty students. Mr. Stephens announced that it would be continued, however, and the school opened again in the September following. I did not return to the school, but went to the State University of Iowa. Mr. Stephens continued the school until the following spring, and then closed it. [We understand that Mr. Stephens is still living in connection with Park College, Mo.]
"One thing that is quite clearly impressed upon my memory is the meeting of the Synod of Iowa, North, in this city in the late winter or early spring of 1869. The application of the Parsons legacy and the endowment of the college was then a very prominent question in Presbyterian circles. Cedar Rapids was a most prominent applicant for the location of the college to be thus endowed, and the seminary had been named Parsons Seminary with a view to attracting that legacy here. A large representation of the synod visited the college at the time I speak of and addressed the students. Amongst others, I remember Doctor Spees, then of Dubuque; the Rev. Samuel Howe, and Mr. Alexander Danskin, of Marengo. They said to us that we were now a college, that whereas yesterday we were a seminary, today we were a college. There was much enthusiasm manifested among us by this statement, and we all felt satisfied that the matter had been practically settled. Subsequent facts proved that their statement was a little premature.
"Another thing that comes to my recollection is the visit of the committee to locate the Parsons legacy in the spring of 1870. This committee was headed by Doctor Craig, then pastor of the church at Keokuk, now of McCormick Seminary, Chicago. The committee made a very thorough examination of the buildings and of the grounds and of the location generally. I distinctly recall their walking over the grounds. The trustees of the seminary, being informed in advance of the coming of this committee, were preparing to create a good impression. A few days before their expected arrival, the ground, which had been leveled off in front of the college, and which consisted of coarse sand, was ornamented by some fifty or sixty evergreen trees, and a large amount of black dirt was hauled in upon the sand with the expectation of spreading it over the sand to present a surface of good soil with a large number of evergreen trees set out in an ornamental order. Unfortunately, however, the committee arrived earlier than was anticipated and the black dirt had not been spread over the sand. To render the situation still worse, a high wind was blowing the day the committee were here and the sand was drifting over the dirt piles and filling up against the lower board of the fence. What the effect of this was upon the committee I have no means of judging. It is, however, interesting to notice that the Parsons legacy never came to Cedar Rapids.
"I could mention many names of Cedar Rapids citizens who as boys attended school at Parsons Seminary during those early years. Mr. C. C. Greene, Mr. John S. Ely, Mr. George B. Douglas, were all there with me. Mr. George W. Winn, also a trustee, used to go there for private lessons in German from Professor Maasburg. Mr. C. L. Miller, of the Gazette, Emery and Harry Brown, and Elmer Higley are names that also occur to me readily. I could mention, likewise, many ladies who studied there in those early years. The Rev. Alexander Danskin, editor of one of our church papers at Detroit, Michigan, was a student there at that time, afterwards graduating from Wabash College; also the Rev. R. M. L. Braden, who likewise went to Wabash College.
"These are a few of the things that come to my mind as I review my two years in Parsons Seminary."
It can easily be read between the lines of Mr. Deacon's reminiscences that Parsons Seminary, however enthusiastic its support was at the beginning, did not continue by any means to be an entire success. We must look for the explanation of this very largely to its lack of financial resources. It was living largely on hopes, and hopes that were not destined to be realized. Mr. Coe's donation, lying in the eighty acres of land, was utterly unproductive of a revenue, and the Parsons legacy, which consisted of four thousand acres of wild lands in various counties in Iowa, had not yet been located in Cedar Rapids, but was hovering in the air as a glittering object which several localities in the state were reaching out to obtain.
It would be an interesting and instructive pursuit to trace the history of this legacy both within the Presbyterian synod of Iowa and within the various cities of the state which made bids for its attainment. The story, as far as Cedar Rapids is concerned, is one of bright hopes, earnest aspiration, valiant endeavor and achievement, to be followed by severe disappointment and bitter regret. The citizens of this city went heroically to work to raise the sum of $75,000 to be subscribed and added to the Parsons legacy [then estimated to be of the value of $50,000], and this again to be added to the Coe donation of eighty acres of land, which were continually increasing in value through the growth of the city of Cedar Rapids. These three sums, when added together, would furnish, it was intelligently felt, a very substantial endowment as the beginning of a college. We have often been told that when this campaign for the raising of the $75,000 had been successfully completed, there was such a general jubilee in our city that instinctively in demonstration thereof the whistles of the locomotives and manufacturing establishments were merrily blown. But all these plans went agley. Although committees from the synods of Iowa had presented unanimous reports recommending that the Parsons legacy be located at Cedar Rapids, it was eventually taken to Fairfield to found Parsons College. The fund of $75,000 which was raised in Cedar Rapids fell to the ground because of the failure to meet its vital condition of the bringing of the Parsons legacy here, and so, once more, all that was left for us was Mr. Coe's donation of the eighty acre plot and the indomitable spirit of a few of the citizens of Cedar Rapids to plant in our city an institution of higher learning in connection with the Presbyterian church.
It is idle at this late date to discuss the wisdom or the folly of those men in the synod who were responsible for this result. It were wholly unproductive to speculate what might have been accomplished by the union of all our educational forces here in Cedar Rapids. What is written is written, what is done is an accomplished fact. Presbyterians are not in the habit of quarreling with Divine Providence, but are the rather given to rejoicing in the sovereignty of God. It is quite conceivable that results already visible can give occasion for gratitude that we have now the two colleges, Coe and Parsons, instead of but one, as was once so ardently hoped for here at Cedar Rapids. If anyone in the years between 1870 and 1873 made an error in judgment in objecting to the merger, the only way to rectify it now is by pressing all the more for the promoting of the endowment and the buildings of both the colleges, the one at Fairfield, and the one at Cedar Rapids.
But the facts are that through the force of circumstances, the school at Cedar Rapids was obliged to suspend its work, and little or nothing was done in the building erected in 1868 from 1871 to 1875. Then for the third time, and under new auspices, was the work begun afresh, and it took place on this wise: On the 26th of April, 1875, the trustees of Parsons Seminary held a meeting, at which meeting a committee of the Presbytery of Cedar Rapids was present for the purpose of consulting with the board to the end that the seminary building and the Coe legacy located at Cedar Rapids might be made available for the establishment of a school of a high order under the care of the said Presbytery. This committee had been appointed by the Presbytery at its session at Anamosa April 24, 1875, and they presented to the board of trustees of Parsons Seminary a formal report in writing, which expressed the readiness of the Presbytery to undertake the care of the school at Cedar Rapids on condition that all its debts be cancelled, and its charter be so amended as to give to the Presbytery the power to appoint its board of trustees. The Presbytery also pledged itself to do all in its power to maintain the school and open it in the school building by the 1st of October, 1875. The board of trustees consented to the proposition of the Presbytery and resolved to change the name of the institution from Parsons Seminary to Coe Collegiate Institute. The articles of incorporation of Parsons Seminary, which had been adopted October 30, 1866, were amended May 11, 1875, to meet the new conditions. The board of trustees was fixed at the number of eighteen, and the power to elect them was vested in the Presbytery of Cedar Rapids, or in the synod of Iowa North, if the said synod shall assume such power with the consent of said Presbytery. The first election was appointed to take place in the fall of the year 1876.
Mr. Daniel Coe had passed from earth in the interval between December 23, 1866, when he deeded the eighty acres of land in Cedar Rapids to Parsons Seminary, and this date in 1875, when these new relations with the seminary were entered into. He left a daughter, an only child, who had become the wife of Mr. J. E. Jewell. This daughter, Mr. Coe's sole heir at law, with her husband, entered in a very friendly manner and measure into the new plans of the institution, and nobly agreed to permit the school to avail itself under certain conditions well understood and agreed to, of the advantages accruing from the revenues of the property.
On the 21st of September, 1875, it was announced at a meeting of the trustees of Coe Collegiate Institute that correspondence had been conducted with the Rev. R. A. Condit with a view to his being made principal of the school. Mr. Condit was then elected to that office. This event marks the entrance into the work of Coe College of a personality of rare value in himself and of rare value to the institution of learning which he served most faithfully for a period of thirty years after his appointment in 1875. Robert Aaron Condit was a man of sweet spirit and gentle demeanor; he was a Christian and a scholar. No one ever doubted his piety or his moral integrity. The students who for a whole generation passed under his care all loved him because he loved them, and was himself so lovable. His influence upon them was mild, but effective, and we venture to say without fear of contradiction, that all the alumni of Coe College who knew him as their preceptor recognize the fact with gratitude that they are better persons for having known him. In the weak and struggling days of Coe Collegiate Institute before it emerged into its present larger, stronger growth, as Coe College, Robert Condit was a factor peculiarly fitted for the task providentially laid upon him, and his full value to the college can scarcely be over-estimated or even stated sufficiently.
On the 8th of March, 1876, Prof. J. W. McLaury was employed to assist Mr. Condit in the school, his salary being raised by voluntary subscriptions. Mr. McLaury's services, though valuable, were not long retained by the institution.
At the meeting of the board held December 28, 1876, the report of the election of the trustees by the Presbytery October 4, 1876, was made, as directed by the charter. And at the same meeting the following officers of the board were chosen: Hon. George Greene, president; Thomas M. Sinclair, vice president; D. W. C. Rowley, secretary; George W. Winn, treasurer. It was at this meeting that the present writer took his seat with his brethren for the first time as an officially accredited member of the board. And it is a matter of grateful, tender recollection to him, that he has remained to this day in unbroken relation with the institution in all possible varieties of official position and duties upon its manifold committees. And it is a solemn recollection with him that he alone remains on the board of all those who have served with him for thirty-four years.
He can well remember the tone and atmosphere of the meetings of the board, which he was then called upon to attend. It was truly a day of small things. The meetings were frequent and they were often lengthy, and we must truly say they were usually dreary, and we went from them with depressed hearts. For the questions for discussion were mostly, not how to promote high christian learning, but how to pay the debts of Parsons Seminary. And the problem was, how to pay something with nothing. There were notes at two of the leading banks of the city, notes which were increasing fearfully by the compounding of interest at ten per cent, and there were notes held by individuals who had loaned money to the seminary, there were mechanic's liens of sums unpaid in the erection of the building put up in 1867-8, and to meet these obligations there was nothing in sight. For all moneys that found their way into the treasury were needed, and more than needed, to pay current bills to teachers, heating and lighting bills and such minor fees. We remember that our treasurer was once garnisheed by the brother of one of our teachers for the payment of his sister's salary, and some sort of compromise settlement was effected.
We have not a thought or word of disparagement concerning any member of the board at that time. But it would have required men of heroic mold and prophetic vision to face those problems. The president of the board, the Hon. George Greene, a name never to be mentioned in this city without a tribute of respect, was deeply immersed in his own private interests and was compelled to be absent from home a great part of the time. Soon after the date of which we speak, he insisted upon pressing his resignation as president of the board. Other prominent business and professional men on the board were also engrossed in large personal interests. The ministers on the board, however valuable though they may have been for counsel concerning educational questions, were quite helpless in grappling with the financial problems which from necessity were uppermost.
The Rev. James Knox had passed from earth October 10, 1875, after having contributed valuable services to the college during the eleven years of his pastorate in this city. We here insert the following tribute to Mr. Knox, which was presented at a meeting of the board of trustees March 8, 1876, and was adopted, all the members present standing:
"In the providence of God the Rev. James Knox, former vice president of this board, having been removed by death we take this opportunity to record our testimony to his exceeding worth as a man and his wisdom and faithfulness as a minister of the gospel, and to his great devotion and usefulness to this institution, having been connected with it from its earliest days, and having given to it his best strength and ability for many years, and his very latest prayers. We feel that his place cannot easily be filled and that in him the college has lost one of its truest and best friends."
There was one notable exception to all these. One personality stands out from the midst of his brethren and to him more than to any other element at this critical period of the history of Coe College do we attribute the fact that we have a college today, and one with such promise and potency. We refer to Mr. Thomas M. Sinclair. Mr. Sinclair had come to Cedar Rapids in 1871 a young man not quite thirty years of age. He was pursuing a large manufacturing business, that of pork packing, with rare energy and intelligence, and with great success. He was making money, and his great desire and single aim was to use this money with a keen sense of responsibility to God and usefulness to his fellow men. He was a man of rare christian character, one among ten thousand. It may truly be said of him that he walked with God. Coming into this young country from the older world, he took a most keenly active interest in all things that pertained to its welfare, and it was a fortunate thing for Coe College that he came to Cedar Rapids at such a time as he did. The cause of christian education was one of his most treasured conceptions of opportunity, and he identified himself with the representative of that cause which he providentially found to his hand in this struggling institution.
Seeing the imperative need of relief from debt which Coe Collegiate Institute manifested, he determined in the nobility of his heart that he would pay out of his own pocket such obligations, principal and interest, as lay against the institution, although they amounted to several thousand dollars. And this he gladly did in all such cases as he could not induce those who owned these obligations to cancel them themselves. And thus it came about one happy day that he could declare the college was actually free from all such incumbrances. Then he and several of his colleagues, inspired with new hope and courage, and determined to launch the institution upon broader and deeper waters, went before the synod of Iowa North, which met at Waterloo, Iowa, in October, 1880, and asked the synod to assume the care and control of the Institute, free from debt, and possessed of a building, and of eighty acres of land in the city of Cedar Rapids. The synod accepted the proposition, and steps were taken at once to frame articles of incorporation of a new organization to be called Coe College. The articles were filed for record on the 16th day of April, 1881. Proper deeds were drawn and filed for record which conveyed to Coe College all the properties owned by Cedar Rapids Collegiate Institute, Parsons Seminary, and Coe Collegiate Institute, and thus the line of inheritance and descent was duly established. In these negotiations relating to the transference of the property through the hands of Mr. and Mrs. Jewell, negotiations which required great care in the handling, the valuable services of Mr. A. V. Eastman should be mentioned. Mr. Eastman served the college most valuably for several years at this period as its secretary. He subsequently removed from Cedar Rapids to St. Paul, Minn., and still later to St. Charles, La., where he died most suddenly several years ago.
We have now emerged with our history from the intricacies of a somewhat tortuous channel, and we have passed out from shoals and shallows to enter upon clearer, deeper, broader waters. Henceforth we are to pursue the story of the institution known as Coe College, which, with devious fortunes, but with perceptibly increasing volume, has been filling its place and doing its work under the charter prepared in 1881. Certain changes have been made to this charter, more or less important, but Coe College is the same institution, conducted by the same incorporation from 1881 to the present time.
The first item which we are called upon to record at this period of the history of our college, is the lamentable death of Mr. Thomas M. Sinclair, which occurred on the 24th day of March, 1881. The circumstances were peculiarly startling. By an accident he fell through an open hatchway in his own packing house and never recovered consciousness, although he continued to breathe for several hours. We can never forget our emotions over this event. It was truly an inscrutable Providence. Mr. Sinclair was at that time a young man, full of vigor and energy. He was a pillar of strength upon whom many leaned. He had done so much to bring the college up to this point of its new beginning that both he and we were looking forward with desire and delight to what might be accomplished through his co-operation. But it was willed otherwise. We cannot interpret the event, but may we not even now at this comparatively far removed time from its occurrence use it in memory of him for the greater glory of God and increase of the college. "He being dead, yet speaketh."
Dr. Stephen Phelps, then the pastor of the Presbyterian church at Vinton, had been very prominently connected with the college ever since its reconstruction as Coe Collegiate Institute in 1875. And now, when it became Coe College, under the care of the synod, he was invited to become its president. He was by nature and grace a pastor greatly beloved by his people, and very useful in the community at Vinton. It was a great request to make of him to ask him to lay down his pastoral office and undertake the new and untried work of a college president. And this was made especially significant because he was asked to preside not over an institution already well endowed, richly equipped with buildings, and possessed of the prestige of a generation, but over an institution still in the process of formation, without any endowment or equipment or faculty or history. He paused to consider his duty, and decided to come to the college and with the help of God to undertake the task.
He was a man of many gifts; an eloquent preacher and lovable pastor who attracted young people to him, and a man of consecration and singleness of aim. His pure spirit and untiring energy were rewarded with much success in spite of the many difficulties which resulted from the limitations of the new situation. He remained in the presidency of the college six years, when he resigned his office to go back to his loved work in the pastorate, to which he felt called of God. He became the pastor of the Presbyterian church at Council Bluffs, and has subsequently served other churches, until at the present time he is in charge of the church at Bellevue, Nebraska, where he lives enjoying the respect and affection of all who know him. He will ever be cherished as the first president of Coe College.
Another figure that rises very prominently and pleasantly before us, as we go back to this period of our history, is that of the first treasurer of Coe College, Mr. John C. Broeksmit. Mr. Broeksmit became the treasurer of Coe Collegiate Institute in 1878, and passed on into the new administration in 1881, and continued in the exercise of his duties as treasurer until he was made treasurer emeritus in 1903, when Mr. John M. Dinwiddie, our present very efficient treasurer, assumed the duties of the office which Mr. Broeksmit laid down. In the formative period of our college history it was very important that the charge of our slender funds should be placed in hands which were trustworthy, not only because of honesty, but also because of business ability and experience. Mr. Broeksmit possessed ideal qualities for a treasurer. As auditor of the B., C. R. & N. R. R. he was accustomed to the handling and careful accounting of the funds of that corporation, and he brought his knowledge, judgment, and integrity to bear upon the financial affairs of the college. We always felt secure in placing these affairs in his hands, and we were not disappointed. Besides his services as treasurer, he also rendered valuable services as a trustee, always faithful in attendance, and giving his full and entire interest to the matters in hand; wise in counsel, kind and genial in manner, and friendly in attitude, he was a peculiarly attractive co-laborer. He should be written down as one who loved his fellow men. His decease in March, 1907, at the age of 82, was universally lamented.
We note the fact that Williston Hall was completed as a boarding hall and dormitory for young ladies in 1881-1882, and the college building, which had been occupied more or less since September, 1868, for school room purposes, was enlarged in 1884 by an addition which simply duplicated the original building.
In 1882 the Rev. E. H. Avery, D. D., who had succeeded Dr. Phelps in the pastoral charge at Vinton when Dr. Phelps came to Cedar Rapids to be president of Coe College, came into the board of trustees, and was elected president of the board. He remained in this office until 1899, when he removed to California where he subsequently died. Dr. Avery's long administration of seventeen years was marked by his qualities of cool, calm judgment, enlightened understanding, and zealous attention to educational interests. He was punctual in attendance at the many meetings of the board, and of the executive committee, coming down from Vinton many times at much sacrifice of personal comfort and the laying aside of his pastoral work, and during that long and eventful period, marked by so many changes from 1882-1899, it was fortunate that we had so wise and safe a president of our board as Eugene H. Avery.
On the 13th of May, 1887, the Rev. James Marshall, D. D., was elected president of the College to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Dr. Phelps. Dr. Marshall was an alumnus of Yale University and had spent several years in New York City in city missionary work. He entered upon the duties of his office in September, 1887. He brought with him to these duties a mind matured and well rounded, a culture produced by wide reading and considerable foreign travel and residence, and an intelligent appreciation of college work. He had a strong sense of the value of discipline in college life. He was much assisted by his cultured wife, whose attractive personality won for her a valued place in the hearts of the students. Mrs. Marshall died in Cedar Rapids after a brief illness in November, 1892, leaving her husband sadly alone, for there were no children in the household. Dr. Marshall labored on bravely in his work until September, 1896, when, just at the opening of the college year, he was stricken down with pneumonia, and his death occurred after a few days amidst circumstances of peculiar solitude. His funeral services were conducted at the First Presbyterian church of this city, September 13, 1896, and the address on that occasion was given by Dr. J. Milton Greene, then of Ft. Dodge, Iowa, now of Havana, Cuba, and a life long friend of the deceased. Dr. Marshall is the only one of the presidents of our college who has departed this life, and he died literally in the harness. In summing up his life and work we avail ourselves of the words which it was our privilege to report to the board at their meeting October 13, 1896:
"He was a man of power, the power that is born of the possession of a high ideal and consecrated purpose and unusual faculty to organize, and an unflagging zeal to execute and perform. He never spared himself. He forgot himself, but he never forgot the college. His works do follow him. These works which remain with us are the strong and united faculty which he organized, and which he inspired with his own high ideals, the noble standard of scholarship to which he elevated the curriculum, the beautiful campus, which is a wonder of improvement when we contrast it with what it was when his hands first touched it, and the example of industry and energy which his life has furnished. It seems pathetic that he should have passed away without seeing the fulfillment of the hopes he so dearly cherished, and the plans be so wisely formulated. But it is a common thing in this world that one should sow and another reap. One conceives the building of the house, but leaves it to another to build it. Yet no one ever thinks that the former lives in vain."
The college pursued its work in the year 1896-7 without a president, and it is a happiness to note the fact that owing to the harmonious cooperation of a devoted faculty and a sympathetic body of students, the year passed with much smoothness and prosperity.
On the 5th of August, 1897, the Rev. Samuel B. McCormick, D. D., was called to the presidency of the college from the pastoral charge of the Presbyterian church of Omaha, Neb. He entered upon the duties of his office with the opening of the college year 1897. He soon made it manifest that a man of great vigor was directing its affairs. He went at his work with a spirit almost fierce, and he kept at it with a persistency that compelled things to come his way. His energy was contagious, and his colleagues in the faculty and on the board of trustees felt it from the day he came among us until the day he left. The pace he kept was not always pleasurable, but it was always fruitful. It was during the seven years of his administration that great growth of the college was experienced in the size of the faculty, the number of the student body and increase of college buildings. The financial campaign that was undertaken to secure the $25,000 promised by Mr. Ralph Vorhees, of New Jersey, on condition of our raising $125,000 additional, was successfully conducted when Dr. McCormick was president. It was he who brought to Coe College the Rev. H. H. Maynard as field secretary, and the two men worked together with congenial vehemence and brought things to pass. Among the things which were brought to pass was the present college gymnasium a very useful and attractive asset.
In the summer of 1904 Doctor McCormick was invited back to his old home in western Pennsylvania to become the chancellor of the Western University of Pennsylvania, located at Pittsburg, and which is now called the University of Pittsburg. This invitation was attractive to him chiefly because it seemed evidently to offer him unusual opportunity of enlarged usefulness in the educational field to which he had devoted his life. Yet it plainly caused him a struggle to sever his connection with Coe College, and with Cedar Rapids as a city. For in the seven years of his life here, he had become strongly attached to his friends and to the community which were strongly attached to him. He also left this portion of our country, the Mississippi Valley which was to his mind so full of hope and promise, with great reluctance. Yet it was clear to him that he ought to go, and we parted from him with much regret September 15, 1904.
Marshall Hall and the Athletic Field House were erected in the summer of 1900, the latter the gift of Mr. C. B. Soutter. The College Gymnasium was completed in 1904.
During the year following the departure of Doctor McCormick the duties of the presidency were discharged by Dr. Stephen W. Stookey. Dr. Stookey was an alumnus of Coe of the class of 1884, the first class to be graduated after Coe became a college. He was always from the beginning greatly attached to the college, and after teaching a while in the schools of Manchester, Iowa, he returned to his alma mater in 1892 to become professor of the natural sciences. From that time onward he filled a place of very distinguished usefulness in the institution, commanding the high respect of his fellow workers in the faculty, the student body, and the board of trustees, until 1908 when he left Coe to assume the office of the presidency of Bellevue College, Nebraska, a position which he still occupies very much to the benefit of that school of learning.
At this point of our story we note the fact that at the October meeting of the board of trustees in 1899, Mr. C. B. Soutter was made the president of the board. Mr. Soutter had been a resident of Cedar Rapids since 1881 when he came from New York city to fill the very responsible place in the business house of T. M. Sinclair & Company made vacant by the death of Mr. Sinclair. The duties of the management of the large packing house were very onerous and responsible, yet Mr. Soutter was able, besides fulfilling them, to give much of his valuable time to his duties as a trustee of the college, to which he was called in 1883. He had already, therefore, for many years, shown marked interest in college work and adaptation for it by taste and culture when in 1899 he was felt to be the logical successor to Dr. Avery in the presidency. He entered at once with zeal and intelligence upon his new and enlarged duties. He was unintermitting in his attention to them until he resigned his office in October, 1907, and, greatly to the regret of his brethren, withdrew from the board of trustees.
On the 23rd of December, 1904, Dr. William Wilberforce Smith was chosen president of the college to succeed Doctor McCormick. Doctor Smith was not a clergyman as his predecessors had been and as hitherto has been usual with American colleges in their selection of a president. He had studied at Princeton Theological Seminary, and had been graduated therefrom, but he had never been ordained to the ministry. He had followed the vocation of a teacher, and was called to the presidency of Coe from the Berkely School in New York city, a school of high grade for boys. He entered upon his duties as president of Coe College at the opening of the college year 1905, and remained with the college for three years. He is now occupying the very honorable position of head of the School of Commerce and Finance in the James Millikin University, Decatur, Illinois.
His administration was marked by three notable events, all of which indicate stages of great progress in the history of the college: First, the successful launching of the plans to put the college on the list of the accepted colleges of the Carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching. This took place near the close of the year 1908. Second, the attainment of the Science Hall, given by Mr. Carnegie at the cost to him of $63,500 upon the condition that the college raise $45,000 for its maintenance. Third, the successful completion of a financial campaign whereby a conditional grant of $50,000 was obtained from the General Board of Education [John D. Rockefeller Foundation] on the condition that the college pay all its debts and raise in various funds the sum of $200,000 additional for endowment and buildings. This campaign increased the assets of the college by $293,000.
It was during this campaign that the services of the Rev. Dr. H. H. Maynard, field secretary of the college, were so peculiarly strenuous and so uniquely valuable. Dr. Maynard merits most honorable mention for his bold conceptions and his heroic execution of them, wherein the word "fail" was expunged from his dictionary. Dr. Maynard left Coe College in the summer of 1908 and has become the vice president and field secretary of the University of Omaha, Nebraska.
In the year 1908-9 which followed the resignation of Dr. Smith, the college was governed by a commission of four members of the faculty, who distributed among themselves the duties of administration. The result was a smooth and prosperous year, although at the end of it all parties concerned were looking very wishfully towards a filling of the vacant office of the presidency. At length, on the 7th of September, 1909, Rev. Dr. John Abner Marquis, pastor of the Presbyterian church at Beaver, Pa., was chosen to be the head of the college. After due deliberation he decided to accept the call, and on the 12th of October, 1909, he was presented to the students and friends of the college as the president-elect. He returned to Beaver to sever his relations with the church there, with the Presbytery and synod, and he came in December and entered upon his duties. On the 13th of June, 1910, in connection with the exercises of commencement week, Doctor Marquis was formally inaugurated president of Coe College. This was the first time in which formal exercises of this character were observed in connection with setting a president over the institution, and the occasion was greeted accordingly with peculiar pleasure, and large use was made of it to perfect a relationship which it is believed augurs great things to the advantage of the college. Doctor Marquis has been so short a time in his office that it would be too soon to speak of what he has done, but it is not too soon to say that in the brief period in which he has been president of the college, he has already awakened the fondest hopes and most steadfast convictions that under his administration the institution over which he presides is destined to move forward to a future which will far surpass any measure of size and value that it ever attained in the past.
On the same week in last June in the midst of the commencement season which witnessed the inauguration of Doctor Marquis, ground was broken on the college campus by Mr. Robert S. Sinclair for a chapel in memory of his father, Mr. Thomas M. Sinclair. This memorial chapel was prepared for almost thirty years ago very soon after Mr. Sinclair's death, but the execution of the purpose has been long delayed. But now at last we see our thoughts and wishes about to be realized in the erection of a building which shall from its beauty and the purposes which it is destined to fulfill be a worthy monument to keep in perpetual remembrance a man, who, in his life-time, did so much to make it possible for us to have a college at all.
* * * * *
We have now accomplished the purpose for which we set out. We have, to the best of our ability, traced the history of Coe College from its beginnings to the present time. We have followed the Institution from its fountain head in the heart and home of the Rev. Williston Jones, when a handful of young men gathered in his parlor for such elementary instruction as could be given by the zealous pastor and his wife, down to the present day, when more than three-hundred students, young men and maidens, gather in the halls of buildings erected and equipped for college purposes, and one of these buildings at least prepared and provided along the most progressive modern lines, the equal of any in the land. Today the faculty of thirty-two persons conducts the teaching of a curriculum which embraces every department of learning that is recognized as belonging to a liberal education. And these teachers have been prepared for their work by special training and selection.
The endowment also has grown from the paltry sum of $1,500, furnished in 1853 by Daniel Coe, to the sum of $450,000, and the total amount of money invested in the plant known as Coe College must exceed $750,000, which is surely no mean aggregate.
In the course of our history, we have seen a feeble rivulet sink at least twice in the sands only to reappear with new volume and freshness further down the bed of the stream. And we see it now a river of such dimension that it cannot disappear again. We have seen the work of the heroic men who have nobly spent upon the college in the days when it sorely needed their help. Such men were not wanting in the days of emergency but were sent from God. They could not have known as we now can plainly see what they were doing. They wrought in faith what it is now given us to possess in sight. They sowed in weakness what we now reap in power. Surely the lesson is plain and impressive; surely the teaching of this historical sketch is to the purport that we with our larger resources should enrich the institution which they sustained and promoted in their poverty.
They could not see how much worth their while it was to give and labor for Cedar Rapids Collegiate Institute, for Parsons Seminary, for Coe Collegiate Institute, for the institution was then but a tender, feeble shoot, whose future development was an uncertainty. We now can plainly see that it is well worth our while to give and labor for Coe College, for it is now one of the most potent and promising of all the colleges in this Mississippi valley. And every intelligent mind who has any powers of observation and has any experience of college work, knows full well that as colleges grow and prosper they need more financial help. It would be the extreme of selfishness and folly to take the view that Coe College is now strong enough and rich enough to advance on its present assets to meet its future.
Its needs are greater than ever. But it presents itself not as a beggar or a suppliant, but as a splendid opportunity for investment. It presents itself as the finest possible place to locate something to be spent in buildings, equipment, and endowment whereby in the course of the years, and we may even say the centuries to come, this money can go on yielding the richest conceivable dividends in the preparation for life and leadership of those of our choicest young men and women who shall come hither from near and far to enjoy the privileges of a college education. And thus as we close, our history becomes really an appeal.
Chapter XXV
The Old Blair Building
The Kimball building in Cedar Rapids stands on the site of an old landmark--the Blair building. This building, with the land and railroad companies it housed from time to time, was the center of much history in the development of Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. It is difficult for us to realize now what an immense influence these companies in the early days had in the settling up of the central west. A debt of gratitude is due the men who risked their fortunes in this developing work that many of us now are too apt to forget. Had it not been for the railroads these early patriots projected into the unsettled portions of these states the development of the west would have been greatly retarded. Immigration would have been slow, for people are never eager to settle in farming communities where there is lack of transportation facilities to get the produce of the farms to market.
It is felt that a brief account of the influences that went out from this center is entirely appropriate here. In fact it is needed as a part of this history of Linn county. Greatly to our regret the gentleman responsible for the historical data given below wishes his name withheld, but through modesty only. What is here printed was furnished by one who knows whereof he speaks, for as Virgil once wrote, "of it he was a great part."
THE BLAIR BUILDING
John I. Blair, of Blairstown, New Jersey, being then the president of several railroad companies having their general offices and official headquarters at Cedar Rapids, erected a building to furnish adequate room for the business of these companies and for the First National Bank of Cedar Rapids, in which he was heavily interested. This building was known as the "Blair Building." In its time it was much the most pretentious structure in the city. It was located at the corner of Eagle and Adams streets--now Third street and Second avenue--was two stories in heighth with a high mansard roof, and set above and back from the street. The plans for this building were made by W. W. Boyington, then the most prominent architect in Chicago. It was what might be termed of the "court house" style, having more the appearance of a public building than one erected for commercial purposes.
On May 23, 1868, Mrs. Mary A. Ely purchased of A. C. Churchill, for Mr. Blair, lots 6, 7, and 8 in block 15, including the brick dwelling house thereon, for the sum of $10,000. Mrs. Ely afterwards conveyed this land to Mr. Blair, who deeded it to himself and Oakes Ames as trustees for the several companies who contributed to the cost of the land and the buildings.
The work of construction began in the autumn of 1868. The building was completed and occupied in the spring or early summer of 1869. The total cost of the land, the new building, and the overhauling of the dwelling house was $54,418, which was paid by the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad Company, The Iowa Rail Road Land Company, the Iowa Falls and Sioux City Railroad Company, the Sioux City and Pacific Railroad Company, and the First National Bank of Cedar Rapids.
In 1870 the dwelling house and the land lying southwesterly of the wall of the Blair building was sold to John F. Ely for $11,000. In 1884 the First National Bank conveyed its interest to the Iowa Falls and Sioux City Railroad Company, and thereafter, until the liquidation of the bank in 1886, occupied the banking room as a tenant. When the bank had gone out of business, the railroads had been sold and the offices moved away, and the real estate holdings of the companies very largely reduced, the owners having no use for the space for their own purposes, and the building being so constructed as not to be useful for commercial purposes, it was decided to sell the property. It was advertised for sale. A customer not being found at private sale, it was sold at public auction on May 2, 1888, to David P. Kimball, of Boston, Massachusetts, for $25,000.
Mr. Kimball, together with his brother L. C. Kimball, of Boston, J. Van Deventer, then of Clinton but later of Knoxville, Tennessee, J. E. Ainsworth, then of Council Bluffs but later of Williamstown, Vermont, and P. E. Hall and Henry V. Ferguson of Cedar Rapids, organized the Kimball Building Company, to whom the property was conveyed.
During the year 1888 the Kimball Building Company rebuilt the Blair Building, extending its exterior walls out to the street line and added a new portion so as to cover the entire lot, making the building when so completed 76 feet on Second avenue and 140 feet on Third street, four stories high, and thereafter known as the "Kimball Building."
In addition to being the president of all of these railroad companies, Mr. Blair after 1862 gave personal attention to their construction and was in absolute control of their affairs in the west. These railroads came to be called the "Blair Roads," and were so generally spoken of in the public prints. From this people generally came to think that he was nearly the sole owner of all, or at least personally owned a controlling interest in the whole group. This, however, was not the fact. Mr. Blair's individual ownership averaged about one-sixth, about another sixth being owned by his associates in the Lackawana Iron & Coal Company of Pennsylvania, among which were Joseph H. Scranton, of Scranton, Pa.; Moses Taylor, of New York, and William E. Dodge, D. Willis James, and James Stokes, who then comprised the firm of Phelps, Dodge & Company.
The controlling interest was always owned by a group of New England capitalists and their associates, who were at the same time the controlling stockholders in the Chicago, Iowa & Nebraska Railroad Company--the line already constructed from Clinton to Cedar Rapids. Among these latter were Oakes and Oliver Ames, of North Easton, Mass.; John Bertram, of Salem, Mass.; Charles A. Lambard, of Maine and later of New York; William T. Glidden, David P. Kimball, Joseph and Frederic Nickerson, of Boston, and Horace Williams, of Clinton, Iowa.
THE CEDAR RAPIDS AND MISSOURI RIVER RAILROAD
In May, 1856, congress passed what was then called "The Iowa Land Bill," making grants of land to the state of Iowa to aid in the construction of four lines of railway across the state, one of which was to be from Lyons City, thence "northwesterly to a point of intersection with the main line of the Iowa Central Railroad near Maquoketa, thence on said main line running as near as practicable to the 42nd parallel across the state of Iowa to the Missouri River." The general assembly of the state by an act approved July 14, 1856, granted the land inuring to the state for the construction of this line to the Iowa Central Air Line Railroad Company upon certain conditions contained in said act. That company began the construction of the road in the year 1856, considerable grading was done at different points along the line as far west us Anamosa, but the panic of 1857 coming on the work was stopped and never again resumed by the Iowa Central Air Line Company.
It being quite probable that at the next legislative session the state would resume this land grant and forfeit the rights of the Iowa Central Company, and pass the grant over to some other company who would undertake the construction of the road; for the purpose of obtaining this grant, the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad Company was organized on June 14, 1859, by the prominent eastern stockholders in the Chicago, Iowa and Nebraska Railroad, together with John Weare and John P. Ely, of Cedar Rapids, and G. M. Woodbury, of Marshalltown, Iowa.
In March, 1860, the state resumed the land grant from the Iowa Central Company and made it over to the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad. Work was begun on the line west from Cedar Rapids in 1860. The bridge over the Cedar river was built in the winter of 1860-61, and forty miles of track completed to Otter Creek Station (now Chelsea) during the year 1861, and to Marshalltown in December, 1862. Milo Smith, of Clinton, Iowa, was the chief engineer and had charge of the construction of the road until it reached Marshalltown.
In 1861 John I. Blair became largely interested in this enterprise, and thereafter took control of the construction beyond Marshalltown. After 1862 W. W. Walker was chief engineer until the road was finished. Track was laid to State Center in 1863, and on July 4, 1864, to Nevada, and to Boone in December, 1864, but the road was not surfaced up, finished and put in operation from Nevada to Boone until the succeeding year.
In July, 1864, congress made an additional grant of land to the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad, and authorized it to change its line of road so as to connect with the Union Pacific Railroad at Council Bluffs. Work beyond Boone began in December, 1865, the track was laid into Council Bluffs in January, 1867, but regular service between Woodbine and Council Bluffs was not instituted until April of that year.
In July, 1862, the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad was leased in perpetuity to the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad Company, which company then owned the line from Chicago west to the Mississippi River opposite Clinton, Iowa, and operated the Chicago, Iowa and Nebraska Railroad under lease. The lease covered not only the portion of the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad then built, but the entire line to the Missouri river when the same should be completed.
On June 2, 1864, the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad Company was consolidated with the Chicago and North-Western Railway, and from that time the operation of the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad under the lease was by the Chicago and North-Western Railway Company.
L. B. Crocker, of Oswego, N. Y., was the first president of the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad, and until 1866. Mr. Crocker during this period was active in the financial affairs of the company, and especially in obtaining the land grant from the state and the supplemental grant direct from the United States. While not a man of large means, he was possessed of great energy and foresight.
John I. Blair was president from 1866 to 1871, when he was succeeded by Horace Williams, who remained the president until the company went out of existence in 1884.
In 1884 the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad was sold to the Chicago and North-Western Railway. It was in fact a consolidation, but for convenience in handling the transaction it was made a sale, the Cedar Rapids Company deeding its railroad and all rights and franchises pertaining thereto to the Chicago and North-Western Railway Company, receiving its pay in the stock of the latter company, which stock was distributed pro rata to the stockholders of the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Company, after which the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad Company closed up its affairs and went out of business.
THE SIOUX CITY AND PACIFIC RAILROAD COMPANY
An act of congress passed in 1862 authorized and required the Union Pacific Railroad Company to construct a railroad and telegraph line from Sioux City to a connection with the Iowa branch of the Union Pacific Railroad, whenever there should be a line of railroad completed through Minnesota or Iowa to Sioux City, Iowa. On July 2, 1864, the original Union Pacific act was amended, and among other things it was provided that the Union Pacific Railroad was released from the construction of said branch, and such company as should be organized under the laws of Iowa, Minnesota, Dakota or Nebraska, and be by the president of the United States designated and approved for that purpose, was authorized to construct said branch and receive therefor lands and subsidy bonds to the same extent that the Union Pacific Railroad would have done under the act of 1862. It was further provided that if a railroad should not be completed to Sioux City across Iowa or Minnesota within eighteen months after the passage of said act, then the company which should have been so designated might commence, continue and complete the construction of said Sioux City branch.
The Sioux City and Pacific Railroad Company was organized in August, 1864, to construct this branch line and was by the president of the United States designated and approved for that purpose. The corporators and first board of directors were Platt Smith, L. B. Crocker, M. K. Jesup, James F. Wilson, A. W. Hubbard, Charles A. Lambard, Frederick Schuchardt, William B. Allison, and John I. Blair. Soon afterwards the Sioux City and Pacific Company passed under the control of Mr. Blair and his associates in the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad. The necessary money to build and equip the Sioux City and Pacific was principally furnished by them. The general offices of the company were first at Dubuque, but on the passing of the control to the Cedar Rapids people headquarters were moved to Cedar Rapids.
Construction was begun in the spring of 1867. The Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Company built six and a half miles of railroad from Missouri Valley Junction to California Junction, where it connected with the line of the Sioux City and Pacific. These six and a half miles were turned over to the latter company. Track laying began at California Junction in September, 1867. Thirty-six miles were completed by the first day of December, 1867, and the line to Sioux City in February, 1868. Early in 1869 the entire line was completed and in operation between Missouri Valley Junction and Sioux City and to Fremont, Nebraska, where connection was made with the Union Pacific Railroad. The cars were ferried across the Missouri river during the summer months, and crossed on a temporary bridge during the winter months up to the fall of 1883, when the bridge across the river was completed and opened up for business. L. Burnett was the engineer in charge of construction of this railroad and superintendent in its operation until January 1, 1878.
This company received from the United States a grant of land comprising the alternate sections within twenty miles on either side of the line of the railroad. But as nearly all of the government land within these limits had already been disposed of, and where the grant of this company lapped over the grant to the Union Pacific Railroad, each company received half, so this congressional grant only amounted to about 42,500 acres. There was acquired through a consolidation with the Nebraska Air Line Railroad a state land grant of 46,000 acres. The company received from the United States a loan of six per cent bonds to the extent of $16,000 per mile of road constructed between Sioux City and Fremont, and issued its own first mortgage bonds to an equal amount.
This company up to August, 1884, operated its own road and also leased and operated the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley road, as the same was from time to time extended. The earnings of the railroad were never sufficient to pay the interest on the first mortgage bonds. The avails of the two land grants and the proceeds of the sales of the town lots along the line up to 1875 (when the remaining land assets were sold to the Missouri Valley Land Company) were used to make up the deficiency. After these assets were exhausted the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River, and Chicago, Iowa and Nebraska Railroad companies, through loans and other methods of assistance, made up the deficit until the sale of all of these roads in 1884.
In 1880 the Chicago, Iowa and Nebraska, and the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River companies by purchase from the individual stockholders acquired over ninety per cent of the capital stock of the Sioux City Company. This stock was in the treasury of these railroads at the time of their purchase by the Chicago and North-Western Railway Company in 1884. Through and under that purchase the Chicago and North-Western Railway Company became the controlling owner of the Sioux City and Pacific and moved its general and operating offices away from Cedar Rapids.
John I. Blair was the first president of the Sioux City and Pacific Railroad Company and was succeeded by Horace Williams in 1871. Mr. Williams was president until the fall of 1877, when he resigned and was succeeded by Oliver Ames. Mr. Ames remained president until the control of the railroad passed into the Chicago and North-Western Railway Company.
THE IOWA FALLS AND SIOUX CITY RAILROAD COMPANY
In the Iowa Land Bill of 1856 a grant was made to aid the construction of a line of railroad from Dubuque to Sioux City on the same terms as fixed for the other three trunk lines across the state, viz: a grant of every odd numbered section within six miles on either side of the railroad, and where such odd numbered sections had already been disposed of by the United States, the railroads were authorized to select an equal number of acres from the odd numbered sections within fifteen miles of the line of the railroad. This grant was given over by the state of Iowa to the Dubuque and Pacific Railroad Company, which company began the work of construction but afterwards failed and was reorganized as the Dubuque and Sioux City Railroad Company. This last named company continued from time to time to extend the line westwardly, so that in 1867 it was completed and in operation to Iowa Falls.
Considerable right-of-way had been acquired between Iowa Falls and Fort Dodge and the grading already commenced when a sale and transfer of the right-of-way, the uncompleted work and the portion of the land grant belonging to the line west of Iowa Falls, was made to John I. Blair and his associates. The Iowa Falls and Sioux City Railroad Company was organized on October 1, 1867, and on January 7, 1868, by a contract of that date, took over from the Dubuque and Sioux City Company all the right-of-way west of Iowa Falls and the work already done, also the proportion of the land grant inuring to the line west of Iowa Falls and all of the rights and franchises of the Dubuque & Sioux City Company pertaining to that portion of the line.
Prior to this date, viz: on September 13, 1867, the Dubuque and Sioux City Railroad Company leased to the Illinois Central Railroad Company the portion of its road already constructed to Iowa Falls and also the line to be thereafter built from Iowa Falls to Sioux City. This lease was for twenty years or in perpetuity at the option of the Illinois Central Railroad Company. The legislature of the state of Iowa on April 7, 1868, passed an act ratifying the said sale by the Dubuque and Sioux City Company and vesting the land grant in the Iowa Falls Company.
The work begun by the Dubuque and Sioux City Company was vigorously prosecuted so that the road was completed and in operation to Fort Dodge early in 1869. In the fall of 1870 it was finished through to Sioux City and the entire line turned over to the Illinois Central Railroad Company for operation under the lease. J. E. Ainsworth was superintendent of construction. In the original articles of incorporation the principal place of business of this company was fixed at Dubuque, Iowa, but in October, 1869, the articles were amended and the main office of the company moved to Cedar Rapids. John I. Blair was the first president. He was succeeded in 1871 by Horace Williams, who remained at the head of the affairs of the company until the control of the same passed into the hands of the Illinois Central Railroad.
In March, 1887, the Iowa Falls and Sioux City Railroad Company sold to the Iowa Rail Road Land Company the remaining acres of its land grant and all assets accruing from land transactions. At that time all of the individual stockholders of the railroad company sold their shares to the Illinois Central Railroad Company, who moved the offices of the corporation from Cedar Rapids to Dubuque, and afterwards consolidated the company with the Dubuque and Sioux City Railroad Company.
THE FREMONT, ELKHORN AND MISSOURI VALLEY RAILROAD COMPANY
This company, while a Nebraska corporation, soon after its organization and up to 1884 kept its general offices and accounting department in the Blair building in Cedar Rapids. It was organized at Fremont, Nebraska, in January, 1869, to construct a line of railroad up the Elkhorn Valley, in Nebraska, and obtained a land grant from the state of Nebraska amounting to about 100,000 acres, also some county bonds from Dodge and Cuming counties, Nebraska. In 1869 John I. Blair and his associates in the Sioux City and Pacific, and the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River enterprises obtained control of the company, and undertook the construction of the railroad. Ten miles of track north from Fremont were laid late in the season of 1869. In 1870 the road was finished to West Point, and leased to the Sioux City and Pacific Company, which company from that time on continued to operate (under said lease) the several extensions of the Elkhorn road up to August, 1884. In 1871 the road was extended to Wisner, a distance of fifty-one miles from Fremont, where the terminus remained until 1879, in which year the main line was built to Oakdale, and six miles of track laid on the Creighton branch north from Norfolk. In 1880 the main line was extended from Oakdale to Neligh, and the Creighton branch finished to Plainview. In 1881 the main line was extended to Long Pine, and the Creighton branch finished to Creighton. In 1882 the main line was extended to Thatcher, and in 1883 to Valentine. In August, 1884--at the time of the purchase of the Iowa roads by the Chicago & Northwestern--this last named company acquired all the stock in the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley Railroad, and thereafter the work of extension was pushed vigorously.
In the two succeeding years a line was built into the Black Hills country and the main line of the road extended to the eastern boundary of the state of Wyoming. Between 1884 and 1888 several lines of railroad in the south Platte country of Nebraska were constructed by the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley Company. L. Burnett, was engineer in charge of location and construction until the road was completed to Wisner. From 1879 to 1889--during which period the main line from Wisner to the west line of the state, the Black Hills branch as far as Whitewood, and the South Platte lines were built--P. E. Hall was superintendent of construction and J. E. Ainsworth chief engineer. John I. Blair was the president from 1869 to 1872, Prince S. Crowell, of East Dennis, Massachusetts, from 1872 to 1876, and James Blair, of Scranton, Pennsylvania, from 1876 to 1883, when he was succeeded by Horace Williams, who remained the president of the company until the control was taken by the Chicago & North-Western Railway Company in 1884.
THE MAPLE RIVER RAILROAD
The major portion of the land grant to the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad--transferred to The Iowa Rail Road Land Company--was situated north of the main line of the Cedar Rapids & Missouri River Railroad. In 1876 a large portion of several counties was vacant and still the property of the land company, so the stockholders interested in the Cedar Rapids & Missouri River Railroad and The Iowa Rail Road Land Company decided to build branch lines north from the main line to the end that purchasers might be found for the land and thus settle up the country, and furnish business for the main line. The Maple River Railroad Company was organized in that year to build these lines. The money for the building of the same was furnished by the stockholders in the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River, and Chicago, Iowa and Nebraska companies, they taking the stock and bonds of the Maple River Railroad Company issued for construction. The road was leased to the Chicago & North-Western Railway Company in advance of construction. Work was begun in the fall of 1876, and in 1877 the line was completed from Maple River Junction to Mapleton, a distance of about sixty miles.
In 1879 a branch was built from Wall Lake Junction to Sac City. This Sac City branch was extended to Holstein in 1882, and in 1883 to Kingsley. The building of the above lines was under control of P. E. Hall, vice president. J. E. Ainsworth was the chief engineer. In 1884 when the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River, Chicago, Iowa and Nebraska, and Sioux City and Pacific roads were purchased by the Chicago & North-Western, the Maple River Railroad was included in the sale, and from that time on became a part of the Chicago & North-Western Railway, which company has since extended the branch line from Kingsley to Sargeants Bluffs, thus making another through line from the east into Sioux City, and also extended the main line from Mapleton to Onawa.
THE MISSOURI VALLEY AND BLAIR RAILWAY & BRIDGE COMPANY
In 1882 congress granted to the Sioux City & Pacific Railroad Company the right to build a bridge across the Missouri river to connect the Iowa and Nebraska portions of its railway at the point where the line crosses the river between Missouri Valley, Iowa, and Blair, Nebraska. The Sioux City & Pacific Company not being financially able to undertake the work, assigned its rights under said act to the Missouri Valley and Blair Railway & Bridge Company, which company was organized in 1882 for the purpose of building the bridge and its approaches. The capital stock of the bridge company was subscribed for by the several railroad companies whose roads made up the through line from Fremont to Chicago, viz: the Sioux City and Pacific, Cedar Rapids and Missouri River, Chicago, Iowa & Nebraska, and the Chicago & North-Western companies, each taking stock in proportion to its mileage in the through line between Fremont and Chicago. The money for the construction of the bridge was raised principally by the sale of bonds, which bonds were guaranteed--both principal and interest--by the several railroad companies who were stockholders in the bridge company. Work was begun early in the summer of 1882 and the bridge completed and opened for traffic in November, 1883.
When the bridge was opened for business it had cost about $1,300,000, of which $400,000 was for the bridge proper across the channel of the river and the other $900,000 for the approaches and protection work. Several hundred thousand dollars have since been expended in protecting the river banks so as to hold the channel of the river under the bridge. After its completion the bridge was operated by the Sioux City and Pacific Railroad Company under a contract.
Horace Williams was the president of the bridge company from the date of organization to the time when the control passed to the Chicago & North-Western Railway. P. E. Hall was vice president and in general charge of construction. George S. Morrison was the engineer who made the plans and directed the building of the bridge. When the Chicago & North-Western Railway Company took over the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River and the other roads in 1884, it became the owner of the entire capital stock of the bridge company and moved the accounting offices away from Cedar Rapids.
The total grants of lands to these companies by the United States, the state of Nebraska, and several counties in Iowa, amounted in the aggregate to about one million, nine hundred and ninety thousand acres. As the several railroads were projected it was the policy of the companies to acquire land around the stations and plat and sell town lots. For convenience in distribution of the proceeds to the stockholders, and in handling the real estate, land and town lot companies were organized from time to time to take over and dispose of not only the land grant lands but of the purchased lands and town lots.
THE IOWA RAIL ROAD LAND COMPANY
This company was organized in 1869 and its capital stock distributed pro rata among the stockholders of the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad. The land grant of that railroad company was conveyed to the land company on September 15, 1869. In 1887 the Iowa Rail Road Land Company bought from the Iowa Falls and Sioux City Railroad Company for cash, all of its remaining unsold lands and the bills receivable, and other assets resulting from previous sales.
From time to time thereafter, through consolidation and purchase, all of the remaining real estate and bills receivable of these several land and town lot companies and of the Moingona Coal Company, which were under common control, passed to the ownership of The Iowa Rail Road Land Company.
The Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad was finished in 1867, and the land grant completely earned then. From that time on the officers of the railroad company and of its successor, the land company, for thirty-five years persistently and continuously worked to have this land grant finally adjusted so that the tracts actually granted might be definitely known and the companies receive evidence of title thereto. Their efforts were finally successful in 1902.
John I. Blair was the first president of this company. Horace Williams was president from 1871 to 1872. In 1872 J. Van Deventer, then of Clinton, Iowa, and later of Knoxville, Tennessee, was elected president and remained so until 1889, since which time P. E. Hall has been the president of this company.
Henry V. Ferguson, now vice president of this company, came into the employ of these companies in 1868, and has been continuously in their service since that time. P. E. Hall has been an officer of The Iowa Rail Road Land Company since 1871.
THE TOWN LOT COMPANIES
The Blair Town Lot and Land Company was organized in June, 1871, and took over the unsold town lots and purchased lands along the line of the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad, and also the avails from previous sales. It was consolidated with The Iowa Rail Road Land Company in 1888.
The Sioux City and Iowa Falls Town Lot and Land Company, organized in 1871 to dispose of the town lots and purchased lands along the Iowa Falls and Sioux City railroad between Iowa Falls and Sioux City, was consolidated with The Iowa Rail Road Land Company in 1888.
The Elkhorn Land and Town Lot Company was organized under the laws of the state of Nebraska in February, 1871. There was conveyed to this company the land grant made to the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley road, also the purchased lands and town lots at the several stations between Fremont and Wisner. This company was consolidated with The Iowa Rail Road Land Company in 1899.
The capital stock of these three companies was issued pro rata to the stockholders of the respective railroad companies along the lines of which these town lot companies respectively operated.
The Missouri Valley Land Company was organized in May, 1875, and purchased for cash the remaining unsold portion of the land grant of the Sioux City and Pacific Railroad Company, as well as the unsold town lots and purchased lands belonging to that company. This company was consolidated with The Iowa Rail Road Land Company on May 3, 1901.
THE MOINGONA COAL COMPANY
When the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad was extended west from Boone there was purchased for account of the stockholders of that company certain timber and coal lands at and near Moingona--where the line of railroad crosses the Des Moines river. The Moingona Coal Company was organized in June, 1866. These coal and timber lands were conveyed to that company, and its shares of capital stock ultimately allotted pro rata to those stockholders in the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad, who had furnished the money for the construction of the line west of Boone--known as the third division of the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad. The town of Moingona was platted and put upon the market and coal mines opened at that point, which mines were operated continuously for about twenty years. In 1899 mining operations had ceased and the personal property of the coal company having been closed out, the remaining real estate was turned over to The Iowa Rail Road Land Company.
The aggregate sales up to 1910 made by these railroads, land and town lot companies and this coal company, including land grant lands, purchased lands, and town lots, amount to sixteen million, six hundred and sixteen thousand dollars. The taxes paid by said companies on said real estate while held by them amount to two million, seven hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars.
For many years it has been fashionable for magazine writers and a certain class of politicians to severely criticise and condemn the public men of that day for their action in making land grants to railroad companies. The members of congress have been characterized as imbecile and corrupt, and the recipients of land grants denounced as thieves and robbers. While it is quite probable that in some cases sufficient care was not exercised, and that such grants sometimes have been a little too liberal, looking at the situation as it was in those days and the subsequent results, there can be no doubt whatever that the policy was a sound one and the action of congress in most of the cases exactly right.
A large portion of what is now known as "the middle west" then consisted of vast unbroken stretches of prairie land, impossible of settlement because of the want of timber for fuel and building purposes. This territory could not support a population until transportation facilities were provided for carrying in the necessary lumber, fuel, and supplies, and carrying away the agricultural products as the land should become cultivated. The price of the land at private entry was then $1.25 per acre. The government gave half of the lands within the land grant limits to the railroads and immediately advanced the price on the even sections to $2.50 per acre, not only getting the same amount of money for the same acreage, but making sales of the government land much more rapidly.
Soon after the first of these grants was made it became the policy of the government to give away its public lands to actual settlers. Until the railroads were built through these vast bodies of vacant lands it had not been possible for the United States to even give away its lands, but after the construction of such roads the whole of this vast territory was in a few years occupied by actual settlers. This settlement and the growth in population and wealth resulting therefrom have more than any one thing contributed to the present greatness of this United States.
The land grant railroads taken as a whole have not been a source of much profit to the original stock and bond holders. In many cases the companies have been forced into extensive and costly litigation to protect their rights; taxing authorities--both county and state--have regarded these land grant companies as legitimate prey. The fact that these several lines of road were built in advance of settlement and civilization in almost every instance, made the first earnings of the roads insufficient to pay interest on bonds issued for construction, let alone dividends to stockholders, so that quite often a large portion of the avails of the sales of these lands had to be used to pay interest on the bonds.
A majority of the land grant railroads have gone through reorganization and foreclosure, some of them several times. In the cases where there has been a profit to the original investors, it has been no greater than it ought to have been considering the risks run.
Chapter XXVI
Some of the Old Cemeteries
The father of Osgood Shepherd, who died in the summer of 1839, was interred at the top of the hill above the tracks on A avenue in Cedar Rapids where the Cedar Rapids Candy Company has erected a building. During the excavation several other graves were found, but it is not known who were buried there.
Another cemetery where a number of old settlers were buried was on Fifth avenue and Eighth street where W. W. Higley later settled; these bodies were removed when Oak Hill Cemetery was laid out. At Linwood burials were made at an early date. One of the first cemeteries was known as Craig's cemetery on section 7 in Franklin township about three miles west of Mt. Vernon. Elias Doty was buried here in 1841 and James Doty in 1847. Members of the Craig family and many others of the first settlers were also buried here. This cemetery is not now kept up and it is not even surrounded by a fence.
Campbell's cemetery was set off by Samuel Campbell, who donated an acre for cemetery purposes. Here Samuel Craig was buried in 1840, members of the Oxley family, the Hunter family, and of the John Paul family, also of the Smith, Berry, Snyder, Blaine, and Darr families, names familiar to all who have a knowledge of early Linn county history.
The Rogers cemetery, laid out by old Dan Rogers, is on the west side of the river near Ivanhoe. Here, also, are buried many of the first settlers who lived on the west side of the river.
A little to the north of Cedar Rapids near the Illinois Central track the relic hunter can find some ruins of what is known as "McCloud's Run." Only a few crumbling ruins remain of what used to be an old mill known to all the old settlers in the county. Through this picturesque valley runs a winding brook known as "Cold Stream," a beautiful rivulet whose clear transparent water plays sonorous music as it runs swiftly over the pebbles as if hastening to join its forces with the Cedar. The surrounding hills have in a good measure been shorn of their beauty by cutting down the timber, and now only the naked clay hills remain, offering a poor pasture for cattle. West of this stream on top of the hill overlooking the city can be found a few broken headstones and some mounds, but no flowers and no evergreens can be seen, not even a fence of any kind, for this little space, like all the surrounding hills, is given up to the pasturing of cattle. There in the vicinity of the city are more than ninety mounds showing that Linn county was from the earliest time a fit abode for man. Who these first settlers were we do not know; they have left us no other relics but these mounds; their funeral pyres and a few carvings indicate that they were Sun and Star worshippers, but whether they belonged to our Indian race has never been ascertained; however, the mound builder serves as a chain in man's existence.
On the top of this hill is located the family cemetery of the McCloud family. John McCloud came here in 1838, and for a number of years was one of the prominent men of this county. From an examination of the small marble slabs thrown about in confusion, scratched by the hand of vandals, are to be found the following inscriptions: "Departed this life June 6, 1846, Hester, consort of John Vardy, age 37 years; in life beloved; in death lamented." "Angelia, died August 30, 1852." "Grant, died March 29, 1852." "Alpheus, died December 28, 1861." "Eliza Jane, died January 11, 1862." "Ester Ann, died January 11, 1861, 15 years." All were children of John G. and J. McCloud. "John McCloud, died November 10, 1863, age 61 years 7 months and 29 days."
Mrs. John Vardy died in 1846 and was buried in this cemetery. Many of these places are neglected, and weeds grow in profusion and the head stones are marred and weather beaten so that the names, dates and deaths of many pioneer men and women have been effaced. This is the history of many neglected burial places in various parts of this county.
Owners of land on which these small places are located think more of their value for corn lands than they do as places for a cemetery, and in many localities these cemeteries have been changed into pastures and corn fields and not even a headstone can be found to tell where some dear father or mother was buried in the long ago.
The Egyptians, Jews, Greeks, and Romans all protected the burial places of their dead, and after a lapse of 2,000 years we can still go back and find something as to how the dead were cared for, and the very place in which they were buried venerated by succeeding generations, while out here in Iowa after a lapse of only half a century many of these places have been neglected and ignored and now some descendant returning to the home of his fathers may be unable to find any trace of where they were buried. Certainly some protection should be offered by the county or the state so that these sacred places may be preserved and the memory of the old settlers duly honored for what they accomplished during the pioneer days in Linn county.
Spring Grove cemetery, near Palo, is one of the oldest cemeteries west of the river. Many of the early settlers have been interred in this lot.
A few of them are: Dyer and Hiram Usher, Charles Dickey, John Garrison, Peter Davis Burt, Thomas Spencer, George Mathew, J. Z. Drake, Caldwells, the Rawson and Tweed families, F. Klumph, Mrs. Dyer Usher, and many others.
Dyer Usher as well as the other members of the Usher families was always friendly with the Indians and in return shared the good will of the various Indian tribes. In an early day one of the chieftains died and was buried in the cemetery lot of the whites according to the Indian customs. This brave was interred with bows and arrows as well as with the dead carcass of a horse or Indian pony. Here the Indian brave has slept for many moons, ready at the final day to join the good Indians on a fleet charger for the happy hunting ground in the by and by.
In the Wilcox cemetery, near Viola, Edward M. Crow and his two wives, many old pioneers as well as old soldiers are laid to rest.
Shiloh cemetery, in Rapids township, has been the burial place for many years of the old settlers in that part of the township.
Scotch Grove cemetery, near Fairfax, has also been used for many years and here are interred most of the old settlers who died in that part of the county.
The Marion cemetery, the Lisbon cemetery, the Center Point cemetery, where is interred a Revolutionary soldier, as well as the Oak Hill cemetery in Cedar Rapids are all places where a large number of the old settlers have been buried during the past fifty years.
The town cemeteries seem to be kept up while the country cemeteries are neglected.
Chapter XXVII
Early Experiences in Stage and Express
One way to learn of the history of a city is by studying its developments and the men who were its leaders in progressive enterprises and in things political. It is another phase of the matter, none the less important, to study the lives of the men who did the persistent everyday work three hundred and sixty-five days in the year and sometimes, it seemed, almost twenty-four hours in a day. Cedar Rapids was fortunate in having a large number of both classes of these pioneers.
Among the latter class who worked steadily and everlastingly from the time Cedar Rapids was a straggling little village to a city of its present size and who aided materially in its upbuilding is W. Fred Reiner, in the early fifties a stage driver out of this city, and for many years after a messenger of the American Express company. It may be safe to assume that Mr. Reiner handled as much money and bullion in pioneer days as did any man in Linn county. His experiences were common to the stage driver and express messenger of the early day. How he overcame one difficulty after another, escaped highwaymen, pulled himself out of mud-holes, etc., as he interestingly relates, is what was the life of the real pioneer of the early fifties and sixties. The events which are most vivid in Mr. Reiner's mind are those which occurred after he became an express messenger for the American Express company.
We are indebted to the Republican for the following interesting account of the experiences of Mr. Reiner in the stage and express business:
It is fifty-three years since Mr. Reiner, at the age of eighteen, left his home in Germany to risk his future in America. Coming west, he settled for one year at Columbus, Ohio, then pushing still farther west, he came to Iowa City in 1854. Here for a little while he did teaming and other work, then began driving stage between Marengo and Iowa City. Soon he was driving for the Western Stage Company. In 1857, while in the employ of his company, he drove the first stage from Calamus, near Dewitt, at that time the terminus of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, to this city. It was while on this route running to Calamus that Mr. Reiner first became acquainted with Conductor Holten, now of Des Moines, and well known all over Iowa as the oldest conductor in the employ of the Chicago and Northwestern.
After working in this capacity for a while Mr. Reiner returned to Cedar county and took up farming. Soon coming back to Iowa City, he went to the stage company's office and was immediately given a stage between that place and Cedar Rapids.
One day while on his route he met at Solon the proprietor of the stage company coming from Iowa City with a four-horse stage. The new stage drew up along where Mr. Reiner was, and the proprietor called, "Fred, I want you and your team." Wondering what was going to happen, Mr. Reiner immediately unhitched his horses, and the driver of the leadhorses on the other stage had also unhitched his. Mr. Reiner's team was put on as the leadhorses, and he was told to get on the stage. While coming on into this city the proprietor informed him that he was to run the new stage from this city to Springville, at that time the end of the Dubuque and Southwestern railroad.
As the railroad was pushed nearer and nearer Marion, the stage route became shorter and shorter, until it was finally between Cedar Rapids and the county seat. It was while driving between this city and Marion that he began to carry express, and that in an unusual way. One of the express messengers who ran into the county seat and whose home was at that place, had to accompany the express down to this city each night on the stage. There being no return stage until morning, he was compelled to spend the night in Cedar Rapids. He would very often ask Mr. Reiner to take charge of the express at Marion and bring it to this city. The express messenger was Dr. J. M. Ristine of this city, now one of the best known physicians in the state.
One day Supt. Thomas Adams, of the American Express company, was at Marion. He opened a conversation with Mr. Reiner in the course of which he asked him if he would be willing to take a position as express messenger on the western end of the Northwestern, at that time nearing the city of Boone. Mr. Reiner took the matter under advisement, and later accepted the position.
Going to Boone, Mr. Reiner was given the first express route from that city through to Omaha. With the railroad stopping at Boone, and nothing more than a mere trail to follow, with a few stopping places, this route on to the Nebraska city was everything but pleasant. Nevertheless Mr. Reiner took hold of the work, and on November 7, 1865, after forty-eight hours of almost continuous riding, he carried the first express ever hauled by the American Express company into the city of Omaha.
Early in the morning of the last day a stop had been made at Council Bluffs for breakfast, and when Mr. Reiner was ready to continue the regular stage had gone. The local agent hustled around and found a carriage which he turned over to Mr. Reiner, so that the first express which the American Express ever took into Omaha did not go by stage, but by carriage.
There was nothing delicate or easy in the route assigned to the new messenger. He left Boone on Tuesday afternoon. The stage, by changing horses at regular intervals, went steadily on during the afternoon and night, and all the next day and night. Early Thursday morning it would pull into Council Bluffs, where a stop for breakfast was made. The trip was then continued to Omaha, which was reached during the forenoon. Leaving Omaha that same afternoon at four o'clock, the return trip was commenced and kept up until Boone was reached at nine o'clock Saturday morning. As Mr. Reiner had previously driven stage he was nearly always found upon the seat with the driver. Thus he was exposed the same as the driver was. Through all kinds of weather, the blizzards of winter and stifling heat of the summer, these trips were made with greatest regularity. Gradually, however, the railroad was worked farther and farther westward, and the stage driver's route shortened accordingly.
During this period of his life Mr. Reiner had many trying and sometimes exciting experiences. Although he is modest about relating them, those which he told a reporter illustrate what the messengers of that period had to contend with.
"I remember one time," said Mr. Reiner, "it was in the spring of the year and the roads were in terrible condition. From Panora to Boone there was one slough after another. We were driving along one night. I was on the box with the driver, when we came to a wide slough. There were tracks where others had driven through, but of course, we could not go across in the same place for fear of cutting through. But the slough looked all right, so we started in a new place. We had got into the center when suddenly the wheels cut through the sod and the stage sank into the water-soaked ground clear up to the axles. The four horses began floundering around in a most dangerous manner. Both the driver and I jumped from our seats down into the mud and water, and as soon as possible unhitched the horses.
"There we were, stuck in the middle of the slough with nine passengers on the inside of the coach, one of them a woman. They, of course, had been aroused by the disturbance, and now called loudly to know what they should do. There was but one thing that could be done, and that was to get out and wade to shore. This they did, one of the gentlemen carrying the woman on his shoulders. They were told that if they would follow the road for three miles they could find lodging for the night. A spring snow was on the ground, and the air was cold, but they started on their way. The driver, capturing one of the horses, jumped on it and rode for help.
"I was left there alone. In the stage coach was my express containing some very valuable property which I did not dare to leave under any circumstances. There was but one thing for me to do, and that was to wade back to the stage coach and climb in and stay there until help should arrive. This I did. I wrapped myself in my buffalo robe which was the best I could do, but it was far from comfortable.
"In the morning help came and we were pulled out of the mud hole. A fresh set of horses was hitched to the stage and we were soon at the next stop. Here we met all the passengers. They had had good beds to sleep in and warm breakfasts, so were anxious to be off. I hastily swallowed a cup of coffee, and still in my wet clothes, climbed up on the box seat, and rode all that day and the next night without a rest. This was but one of the experiences which were familiar to stage drivers and express messengers of that time."
Although during his twenty-five years of service for the American Express company Mr. Reiner never lost a penny which had been placed in his charge, it was not because he did not have his opportunities to do so.
"There was one experience," he remarked, "that I remember well, and which came as near being a hold-up as I ever had. It was the same week that an additional express messenger had been put on the route between Boone and Omaha, and our routes had been altered accordingly. The stage left Boone on a Monday afternoon and was in the neighborhood of Denison. It was a bright night and the horses were jogging along at a good gait.
"Suddenly ahead the driver saw two men crouched by the roadside. As we drew near they both sprang out into the road and began firing at us rapidly. One of the first shots struck and killed the rear horse on the left hand side. The other three animals sprang forward with such force that they fairly jerked the harness off from the animal which had been shot. They circled to the right and the wheels of the coach ran over the fallen animal. The animals continued their circling until they completely reversed the coach, then they turned and ran down the road along which we had just come. It was always believed that the highwaymen did not know of this change, and thought the stage carried express as before. But the fact was I had left Boone on Monday instead of Tuesday.
"The driver, according to the story he told me afterwards, was cussed most roundly for not stopping the team, but he insisted that the shooting the robbers had done so frightened the horses that they had become unmanageable. Although the highwaymen were far from satisfied with the explanation they made the best of a bad matter, and began to search the driver to see what they could find. He gave them his pocketbook, which, he said, contained forty dollars. That, by the way, is more money than I ever saw him have at one time, and considerably more than stage drivers usually carried. The hold-up men took the money and gave the pocketbook back to him, as it contained some papers he wished to save and which were of no value to the robbers.
"Soon after this incident, while going over my route one cold night the driver stopped the team and called to me. I sat in a seat on the inside with my revolvers lying beside me. Getting out of the door, the driver told me there was a man crouched down in the road ahead of us. We were out on the prairie some miles from a station. I went forward, with no feeling of pleasure, to investigate. The man came forward also and I recognized him as a fellow who had been lying around one of the stations for several days. I asked him what he wanted and he replied that he wished to get in and ride for a ways. Although the night was cold I could not let him in for fear that he had companions farther up the road and was only getting inside to get the lay of the land. The express was unusually valuable that night. The fellow ran along behind the coach for some time, but the horses gradually outdistanced him, and that was the last we ever saw of him."
After the completion of the railroad, Mr. Reiner was given a position as express messenger on one of the trains. "Many times," said the veteran express messenger, "I have literally had the car floor paved with gold and silver, over which I walked in doing my work. We had carried lots of gold and silver bars east from Virginia City, in Nevada. In order that, the weight should be evenly distributed the bars were spread like paving bricks all over the car floor. The following description, written by a reporter from one of the Council Bluffs papers while Mr. Reiner was yet at Boone, gives a description of the work of carrying the bullion:
"While viewing the scenes at the transfer yesterday afternoon, we boarded W. F. Reiner's Northwestern express car and beheld a scene that caused our hump of inquisitiveness to jump. Mr. Reiner is a messenger of the American Merchants Union Express company, and will have served in his present position and on his present route seven years in November next. He lives in Boone. On the floor of his car were sixty-seven gold and silver bricks. That is, each brick was composed of gold and silver in compound. In some of them, silver predominated--in value. They resemble silver almost entirely in color. They are of somewhat irregular sizes, though nearly every one of them weighs more than one hundred pounds. Some of them were much more refined than the others. The amount of gold and silver in each one is stamped on the face or top, in different lines, and the total value of the brick is added in a third line. The value of each metal is marked, even to a cent. How those values can be so accurately determined in a compound brick is beyond our knowledge. Fifty-seven of those bricks which we yesterday saw, were worth $101,950.80. The remaining eleven were worth $15,077.57. They were mostly from Virginia City and are being taken to New York. Mr. Reiner informed us also that these bricks are carried only by the Northwestern and Rock Island roads. On some days he has had as many as 160 of them in his car. They are taken east nearly every day."
For ten years Mr. Reiner lived in Boone, then a redivision of the road brought him back to this city. For the next fifteen years he continued to run out of this city and do active service. Thirteen years ago the terrible strain he had undergone in the earlier years of service for the company began to tell upon him and he broke down in health. Then, if a private company ever did a good and wise thing, the American Express company did it. They said they realized the value that Mr. Reiner had been to them when they were getting established in Iowa and running their route through to Omaha, and they would not forget his efficient services now that he was getting old.
Chapter XXVIII
Linn County Libraries
THE IOWA MASONIC LIBRARY
BY HELEN R. DONNAN
The Iowa Masonic Library, "unique in idea and unapproachable in scope," is an institution of which Cedar Rapids is proud, and to which the Masons of Iowa point as a satisfactory answer to those who would question the purposes of the fraternity.
As early as 1844 the late T. S. Parvin, grand secretary and librarian of the Grand Lodge of Iowa, A. F. & A. M., from its organization until his death in 1901, began the collection of books which today is world famous. With rare discernment and infinite patience this vast wealth of treasures has been gathered together and placed at the disposal of all students.
The library, for years housed at Muscatine, later in the Burtis Opera House at Davenport, was removed to Iowa City in the year 1867, where it remained in rooms rented for that purpose until 1883 when it had so far outgrown its quarters that a new and more permanent home was needed. At the annual session of 1883, the Grand Lodge set aside $20,000.00 for a fireproof building, and, the citizens of Cedar Rapids having offered to donate a lot and $10,000.00, it was decided to build in that city. The site selected was ideal, fronting on one of the most beautiful avenues, in the residence district, yet within a few blocks of the business portion of the city. The front of the building, which is of red pressed brick trimmed with sandstone, consists of two stories and an attic, while the rear part is two stories, and under all is a basement, well lighted and ventilated by a wide area-way. Surrounded by a well kept lawn and beautiful shade trees, it presents a very attractive appearance.
So rapidly did the library grow that in 1901 the trustees were authorized to purchase the adjoining corner lot on which was a fine brick residence. This has since been used as a general reference library and reading room, known as the Annex. Both buildings have recently been improved and re-decorated until today one entering either one finds "a place of quiet and beauty, where sightseeing is a delight, and study an absolute pleasure." On the right of the main entrance is the Grand Master's room, furnished in dark and massive oak, thoroughly in keeping with the dignity of the fraternity. On the left, a lighter treatment in decoration and the mahogany furniture make the reception room a delightful apartment in which the friends gather and are made welcome. The fireproof doors at the end of the entrance hall open into the library proper, filled with book cases on every side, and in the center of the room are large glass cases containing thousands of rare and interesting curios. The upper floor of this hall is a gallery guarded by an iron railing and lighted by the skylight above. This, too, is filled to overflowing with books and display cases. On the walls of both rooms hang pictures of the long line of Grand Masters who have ruled the craft in Iowa from 1844 to the present time.
The leading feature of this library is naturally the Masonic department. Here in cases adorned with meaning symbols are to be found all the standard works of the fraternity and those which later scholarship has contributed to the history, philosophy and ceremonial of Masonry, together with the proceedings of all Grand Lodges, Chapters, Commanderies, Councils, Shrines, Chapters of the Order of Eastern Star, and all Masonic organizations of the world. This department also contains the constitutions, by-laws, monitors, and rituals of all Masonic bodies, both American and foreign. Masonic periodicals and magazines from all parts of the globe are on the shelves in perhaps more complete sets than can be found in any other library. Many rare and costly works have been added, some few of which are unique, no other copy being known to exist.
The early history of Freemasonry shows traces of the influence of other secret societies, and it in turn has influenced almost every other secret organization. A Masonic library would therefore be incomplete without the history, literature and ceremonies of these associations. This semi-Masonic department includes all works bearing upon the secret societies of the American revolution, the early secret societies of the middle ages and France, works pertaining to the history of the Nestorians, Dervishes, Thugs, Druids, Rosicrucians, the Guilds, etc.
As Masonry is closely linked with art, archaeology, mythology, and religion, a large collection of this class of material finds place in the general reference library, now housed in the Annex. The French and German books, comprising some four thousand volumes, the government publications, and a large number of proceedings have been removed to the basement, while the attic is crowded with duplicate proceedings, magazines, and pamphlets without number.
Another interesting feature is the Iowa department containing works by Iowa authors, as well as all works pertaining to the history of the state.
In order to make this collection of the greatest possible benefit to its patrons, it has been classified and a card catalog of the books has been made in accordance with approved library methods.
For the casual visitor the principal attraction is the museum, which contains archaeological, mineralogical, and geological specimens from all parts of the country. Here the relics of ancient American races and tribes give evidence of prehistoric culture, while the ruder implements, weapons and pottery of the aborigines make a notable collection. One large case contains only weapons of warfare; another is filled with Iowa birds. An unusual collection is the one of shoes from China, Japan, India, Burma, Siam, and several other foreign lands. The case of colonial relics is especially interesting to older visitors. The book lover finds the case devoted to rare and beautifully bound books the supreme attraction, while the small boy enjoys the stamp collection, the post card display, the birds, and the "freaks" of nature exhibited here. Masonic badges, medals, coins, old diplomas, charters, manuscripts, aprons, and other old lodge paraphernalia are artistically displayed in the various glass cases. Scattered throughout both buildings are many pictures, fine art pieces in bronze, bisque, and marble, antique vases, jars, pitchers, and various pieces of modern pottery, all donated by friends of the library.
In the autograph letter department are three large double cases each having one hundred and forty glass covered drawers devoted exclusively to this material. Here may be found the signatures of noted literary men, the presidents of the United States, governors of Iowa, and others prominently identified with the history of the state as well as noted men of the fraternity.
In 1901, upon the death of T. S. Parvin, the founder of the institution, his son, Newton R. Parvin, was elected Grand Secretary and librarian. He is peculiarly fitted for this responsible position, having served as deputy to his father for twenty-five years, and, like his father, is giving to the building up of this splendid library the "enthusiasm and energy of a single-purposed life."
N. R. Parvin being Grand Secretary as well as librarian, the headquarters of the Grand Lodge are in the library building, and in the three splendidly equipped vaults are stored many valuable papers and records. A card index giving the record of every member in the state has recently been completed and placed in one of the vaults.
The entire expense of maintaining the library is met by an annual tax of ten cents for each member in the state. All expenditures are under the supervision of a board of three trustees appointed by the Grand Master for a term of six years. Those composing the present board are W. S. Gardner of Clinton, W. L. Eaton of Osage, and Crom Bowen of Des Moines.
FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY OF CEDAR RAPIDS
BY JOANNA HAGEY
The people of Cedar Rapids had felt the need of a public library. In the seventies a subscription library was founded but it was forced to discontinue from lack of funds and the books were given to the Y. M. C. A. The City Federation of Ladies' Literary Clubs, and especially the president, Mrs. C. D. Van Vechten, should be given the credit for creating a sentiment that resulted in a vote of the people on March 2, 1896, to establish a library.
The council appointed a library board in June. In October the first tax levy was made, and they began the formation and organization of the new library which was opened to the public January 15, 1897, in rooms in the Granby block.
The work prospered and the patronage increased so that additional space was needed, and in 1900 the library was moved to the Dows Auditorium.
Again larger quarters were demanded and it was deemed best for the city to own the library building. Mr. Andrew Carnegie generously gave $75,000, which was used for the erection of the beautiful and commodious building on the corner of Fifth street and Third avenue. The new building was dedicated June 23, 1905.
Some idea of the growth of the library can be gained from the following comparisons: When the library was opened there were 1,325 volumes on the shelves. December 31, 1909, there were 19,505 volumes; 29,730 books were circulated the first year, and 94,078 books last year; the receipts the first year were $4,471.52; last year they amounted to $11,049.14.
Mrs. C D. Van Vechten, Mrs. Charles A. Clark, Mrs. N. M. Hubbard, Sr., Miss Emma J. Fordyce, F. F. Dawley, A. T. Cooper, V. A. Jung, L. W. Anderson, and Luther A. Brewer constituted the first board of trustees. The following are the present board: Mrs. Mary Ziek Andre, Mrs. Kate Terry Loomis, Miss Emma J. Fordyce, Miss Elizabeth Cock, B. L. Wick, L. W. Anderson, Frank Filip, C. M. Doan, and Sandford Kerr. Others who have served as trustees are: Miss Meta Aussieker, Mrs. Ida M. Ballheim, Mrs. Channie J. Redmond, H. H. Troy, Joseph Mekota, John Vosmek, J. M. Terry, J. T. Hamilton, W. I. Endicott, Jomes A. Molony, Robert Palmer, John W. Barry, and Theodore Schauwecker.
Miss Virginia Dodge was librarian from 1896-1899, Miss Harriet L. McCrory from 1899-1903, and Miss Harriet A. Wood from 1903-1910. The present librarian is Miss E. Joanna Hagey.
COE COLLEGE LIBRARY
Coe College at an early date owned a well selected text-book library. It was generally conducted by one of the students. Many donations have been made, mostly by men connected with the Presbyterian ministry. The large library of Rev. James Knox was one of the early additions made. Later the Rev. George R. Carroll presented his valuable collection of books to the college. Many valuable books have been donated from time to time by members of the faculty, by students, and persons interested in the growth of the college.
Miss Ida Dodd and Miss Cornelia Shelley served as librarians for some years. Miss Mary Irene Amidon, by the assistance of several helpers, has placed the library on a sound basis by a system of cataloguing which before had been neglected.
COLLEGE AND PUBLIC LIBRARY, MOUNT VERNON
No definite data can be given for the beginning of the library at Mount Vernon, though in the catalogue of the Iowa Conference Seminary for 1855 the statement is made that "a small but good selection of books has been procured to which students will have access." There seems to have been a hesitancy about giving any number of volumes, till in the catalogue of 1864-5 we read that "the college library has about 600 volumes."
From this early beginning the library very gradually grew in strength and helpfulness under the direction of various members of the college faculty. The professors who served as librarians were: S. N. Fellows, 1857-60, A. Collin, 1860-70, H. H. Freer, 1870-73, S. N. Williams, 1873-91, W. C. Webster, 1891-93.
In 1891 Miss May L. Fairbanks was appointed assistant librarian, and in 1893 she was elected librarian, which position she still holds.
A gift of $50,000 was obtained from Andrew Carnegie for a library building for the town and college. In June, 1904, the corner stone of the new building was laid, and in August, 1905, the college library, consisting of 25,548 volumes, was moved into the new building.
December 1, 1905, the library board of trustees was formally organized with Dr. James E. Harlan as president. Prof. W. H. Norton, Col. H. H. Rood, E. B. Willix, W. E. Platner, Prof. H. M. Kelly, Dr. A. Crawford, A. A. Bauman, J. B. Leigh.
There has been no change in the library board. The annual income is $5,000.
The library now consists of 33,900 volumes and many hundred pamphlets that have not been numbered. The administration of the library resembles that of a college more than a public library, and no list of borrowers is kept.
MARION FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
Marion free public library dates from 1903. Miss Adaliza Daniels first began her work as early as 1902, to agitate for a Carnegie library. She and Mrs. C. N. Owen then began to solicit funds for a building site and collected $3,775 for that purpose. The first board consisted of the following: Messrs. Alderman, Alexander, Bowman, Treat, Mrs. Dobson, Mrs. Busby, Mrs. Owen, Miss Tyler, and Miss Daniels. The present board consists of J. W. Bowman, president, Dr. J. Morehead, vice-president, Mrs. C. N. Owen, secretary, Mr. Wood, Miss Marshall, Mrs. B. C. Busby, Mrs. Millen, and Mrs. Parkhurst.
The income of the library has varied from $1,100 to $1,350. There are 800 card holders and more than 3,550 volumes in the library. The librarians have been Miss Mary Parkhurst and Miss Mabel Alexander.
THE BOHEMIAN READING SOCIETY
The Bohemian Reading Society was organized November 22, 1868, at Cedar Rapids, and some of the charter members who are still living are: Anthony Soukup, Frank Soukup, John Pichner, and John Safranek.
Many of the pioneer settlers contributed from time to time largely of their means for the purchase of Bohemian books and tried to inculcate in their children a desire for the reading of books printed in their own tongue. Many foreign newspapers and magazines were also taken in order to keep up with the times and to create in the minds of the young a love of the land of their fathers.
The average number of books loaned has been about 3,000 volumes a year. The library being open to the members at stated times, much reading is done in the library building, where a librarian is in charge. The number of bound books for circulation has been from 2,000 to 2,500 volumes. The expense of running the library outside of room rent, heat, etc., has been from $200 to $300. Many donations of books and magazines are constantly being made.
A few of the librarians have been the following named persons: Mrs. Kabasa, Neibert and Stolba, Frank Kurka. The present librarian has served continuously for the past sixteen years.
Chapter XXIX
Wages and Prices in the County from 1846 to 1856
During the decade from 1846 to 1856 land was very cheap in Linn county, and everything else was in proportion. Wages were low, and what the farmer raised on his premises he could find no market for, and, consequently, outside of wheat it was pretty much worthless. The panic of 1857 was a severe one in the county, and many of the bankers and business people met with severe reverses from which some never recovered. No one had any foreboding of the financial storm and all were caught short to such an extent that they lost nearly everything, even their homes which had been mortgaged. Many a business man with good credit, possessed of considerable means, became swamped in the crash. It mattered not what a man had in property, if it was not in gold it had no price, and there was no market for anything except on a cash basis.
From N. B. Brown's account book we glean the following as to prices for eatables in Cedar Rapids in 1846: Beef, 2-1/2c per pound, flour, 2c per pound (1-1/2c in 1847), beans, 75c per bushel, veal, 3c per pound, coffee, 14c per pound, sugar, 16-1/2c per pound, tea, $1.25 per pound, wheat 37-1/2c per bushel, corn meal, 25c per bushel, buckwheat flour, 1-1/4c per pound. This interesting book is in the possession of Emery Brown, one of the sons.
During the decade mentioned a horse sold at from fifty to sixty dollars, and a yoke of oxen could be had for the price of one good horse. As many of the pioneer farmers had not the means to purchase a team of horses, they did the next best thing and invested in a yoke of oxen and thus managed to get along and weather the storm. A good wagon with spring seat cost from one hundred to one hundred and twenty-five dollars, and a log chain from two dollars and a half to five dollars. Ordinary stirring plows sold at from ten to fifteen dollars. Mowers and reapers were not common in those days, the scythe and the cradle being the tools with which the young boy earned some of his first spending money. It was surprising how much hay and grain a good farm hand could cut in a season in this way.
The people dealt in log houses in those days like we do in second hand furniture today. These houses were bought and sold at from fifty to seventy-five dollars each and moved at leisure in the winter time from one part of the township to another; at times a log house was moved from ten to fifteen miles and everyone chipped in and helped to move. A jug of whiskey, some hot coffee, and a good dinner were all they expected in the way of remuneration for their labor. The young folks at times insisted on a free for all dance and a free fiddler for the assistance they had rendered in moving and fixing up the house. If the young married couple who were to occupy the house did not dance or believe in dancing, a party or two were given, ending up with a midnight supper.
While the prices of government land was one dollar and twenty-five cents an acre, the speculator land generally sold at from five to ten dollars and as high as twelve dollars and fifty cents an acre. Wages were very low, from fifty to seventy-five cents a day being the average price paid a good farm hand. In town a person generally received from seventy-five cents to a dollar a day and then boarded himself.
Oats sold at fifteen cents a bushel, corn at ten cents, wheat at from forty-five to sixty cents. Hogs sold at one dollar and fifty cents a hundred. Potatoes were considered high at ten cents a bushel, while quail sold at thirty cents a dozen. Butter brought from five to six cents a pound, and eggs six to eight cents a dozen.
While prices for farm products were quite low the prices paid for the necessaries of life were high on account of lack of transportation facilities. Coffee sold at ten cents a pound, sugar at from eleven to twelve cents, tea retailed at eighty-five cents. Calico sold at forty cents a yard--and a poor quality at that. Salt in the early days sold at ten dollars a barrel, the price coming down in Cedar Rapids to five dollars when W. B. Mack brought his first cargo of salt by steamer from Ohio to Cedar Rapids.
Nearly all worked on shares, land was rented on shares, grist mills operated on shares, as well as saw mills. Masons and carpenters had to take their wages out frequently in form of property, and, while they were hard up and needed the money, this property in time made many of them wealthy men by their retaining what had been turned over to them in the form of wages. Old Thomas McGregor relates how he worked for a contractor by the name of Robinson and was offered lots where the mills of the Quaker Oats Company now stand at ten dollars a lot to apply on his wages, and when the writer inquired why he did not take these lots he replied: "My wages were seventy-five cents a day, on which I had to keep a wife and children, and they were more to me than corner lots." Old James Cleghorn worked for the Greene Bros. in the saw mill and was offered corner lots, and finally obtained in trade a forty acre tract of land in Scotch Grove for his summer's work. Old Elias Skinner, the well known Methodist preacher, in the early fifties traded a team, harness and wagon for a forty acre tract on what is now the location of the town of Norway, and at the time thought that the man who got the team had the best of the bargain, as there was no market for land and no income from it, while with a team of horses a man could make something and always could trade it for something else if he wanted to. Money was a scarce article in those days, while labor was cheap and the days were long. It was generally work from sun up to sun down and sometimes until way after dark, and no one was heard to complain, because if a person did complain there were always plenty of others willing to take the place of the man who wanted to quit.
There were not many varieties of food in the good old days, but the people were healthy, they worked hard and everything tasted good. The ordinary dishes were Indian corn, corn bread, hominy, corn dodgers, bacon, venison, and prairie chickens. The cooking was done by an open fireplace, stoves in those days being few. Rye coffee was used frequently instead of the ordinary coffee and tasted good after a long day's hard labor in the timber. Many a thrifty housewife worked for weeks to dry corn in the fall of the year, as well as to dry apples; hominy was also made at home. All these delicacies--so-called--tasted good during the winter months and no one was known to be afflicted with ptomaine poisoning.
Before the days of grist mills coffee mills were used for the grinding of corn and wheat. In some instances a few of the early settlers used the Indian stones, turned by hand; later horse mills were erected, which the early settlers thought were great inventions. These mills consisted merely of an enclosure of logs with a large wheel in the middle around which a leather belt was placed, which was also attached to a smaller wheel which turned the mill stones and ground the corn. The pioneers would come several miles to such a mill and sometimes had to wait a day or more in order to get their grist ground. They would help run the mill, would sleep in the wagon at night and live on parched corn on the trip; if a cup of coffee could be obtained at the stopping place the settler would be more than gratified.
While the settlers raised almost all their provisions, they also made most of what they had to wear. In a very cheap sort of a way they tanned their own leather and made their own shoes; in short, relied on their own ingenuity for nearly all the comforts of life.
The women folks were as handy as the men, if not more so, for they were all spinsters, dressmakers and tailors; they made the blue hunting shirts with fringes, adorned the buckskin belt which was worn around the waist, and also cut out the tight fitting cotton blouses worn by the boys, and even made moccasins and a coarse kind of brogan shoes. They were furriers as well, for they made some excellent fitting wolf skin caps for the men and some neat looking gingham bonnets, well starched, for themselves. While the shoes were at times heavy and ill fitting, they were only worn on Sundays and during the winter, for as soon as spring came nearly everyone went barefoot, about the house at least, for the sake of economy as well as for comfort.
During these pioneer years in the forties and fifties our ancestors did not have an easy time of it by any means. They endured the hardships of pioneer life and were subject to fevers, as well as homesickness, and frequently during the winter months they were exposed to the severity of the early Iowa winters when the log houses were both small and uncomfortable, but they were men and women of iron nerve, full of push and energy and perseverance. They had taken up a tedious battle for existence out on the barren prairies of Iowa, far away from home and kindred, and, at times, surrounded by wild frontiersmen, freebooters and ruffians who were making a last stand in these parts of Iowa until the opening up of the vast barren tracts west of the Missouri river. It was not until after the Civil war that the people of Linn county became, so to speak, comfortably well fixed and had some of the comforts which they had so long looked for during the early years.
Chapter XXX
Some of the First Things in Cedar Rapids and Linn County
The first log cabin was erected on the site of what became Cedar Rapids, by Osgood Shepherd or Wilbert Stone in 1838. The first frame house was erected by John Vardy in 1842, and the first brick building was erected by Porter W. Earle at the corner of First avenue and Second street in 1844.
P. J. Upton, of the Star Wagon Company, received a carload of freight on the first freight train that ever came to Cedar Rapids; this was in 1859. W. B. Mack received the first cargo of salt on the steamboat "Cedar Rapids" in 1855, bringing down the price of salt from $10.00 to $5.00 a barrel.
The first steamboat company, incorporated for $20,000.00, was organized in 1855, some of the incorporators being Alex. Ely, Dr. S. D. Carpenter, the Greenes, and other business men of Cedar Rapids.
The first grist mill was built by N. B. Brown in 1843. Isaac Cook was the first lawyer locating in Cedar Rapids; John Shearer was the first justice of the peace, and James Lewis was the first constable. The first general store was opened by George and Joseph Greene in 1842. Judge George Greene taught one of the first schools near Ivanhoe in 1839 and 1840. Alexander Ely, George Greene, and N. B. Brown, with others, erected the first school house in 1847 in Cedar Rapids, later selling it to the school district.
Joseph Greene was the first postmaster in Cedar Rapids and carried the mail in his plug hat and distributed the same as he happened to meet the people to whom the letters were addressed.
Dr. S. H. Tryon was the first physician in Linn county. Dr. E. L. Mansfield was one of the first physicians locating in Cedar Rapids, in 1847. H. W. Gray was the first sheriff of Linn county, being appointed by Governor Lucas in 1838. The first county fair was held in October, 1855. The first hotel was built in 1847, called the Union House, James Dyer being landlord; this building was destroyed by fire in 1865.
In 1855 W. D. Watrous, W. W. Smith, and J. J. Snouffer built the steamer "Blackhawk" for the purpose of navigating the Cedar river. It ran between Cedar Rapids and Waterloo for two years. It was later purchased by the government and used for a supply boat on the lower Mississippi. In the '40s and '50s Mississippi steamboats made regular trips to Cedar Rapids. The first railroad reached Cedar Rapids in 1859; it is now known as the Chicago & Northwestern.
The first fire company was organized in Cedar Rapids in 1869. In 1871 the Cedar Rapids Gas Light Company was organized. The first mayor of Cedar Rapids was Martin L. Barber.
The first steam mill in the county was built by J. P. Glass in 1845. The first hand-raking reaper brought into Linn county was by William Ure, of Fairfax township, who hauled it from Chicago by oxen in the summer of 1847.
The first newspaper in Cedar Rapids was the Progressive Era, published in 1851 by D. O. Finch; the first newspaper in Marion was the Prairie Star, published by A. Hoyt in 1852; the first daily newspaper published in Linn county was called the Morning Observer, the first number being issued on September 1, 1870, and edited by Thomas G. Newman and Z. Enos.
N. B. Brown erected the first flour mill in 1844; the first woolen mill was erected in 1848. The first judge of probate in the county was Israel Mitchell, appointed in 1838. He was also one of the justices.
The first bridge erected across the Cedar river in Cedar Rapids was in 1856 at what is now Seventh avenue. The oldest settler now living in the county is Robert Ellis, who arrived in 1838.
The first marriage in Linn county was that of Preston Scott and Miss Betsey Martin, which occurred in July, 1839.
The first white male born in Linn county was George Cone, who first saw light at Marion, April 12, 1839.
The first death in the county was that of Mr. Williams, who died January 15, 1839. He was buried in the Campbell cemetery near Bertram. The inscription on his tombstone is yet visible.
The first mill was erected by John S. Oxley in 1842-43 on Big creek. It was later purchased by Jacob Mann.
The first citizen to become naturalized was Peter Garren who, during the October term of court, 1840, as a native of Scotland, renounced all allegiance to the queen of Great Britain.
James E. Bromwell, who came to Linn county in 1839, will always be remembered by the residents of Marion. He helped lay out the county seat. He made the first coffin for the first interment in its cemetery, assisted in the erection of the first residence in the town, as well as in the erection of the first store buildings, besides taking time enough to procure the second marriage license issued in the county for his marriage to Catherine Gray, on August 26, 1841.
Elizabeth Bennett, a native of Syracuse, New York, who had been reared in Canada and married to Edward Crow, November 14, 1839, is supposed to have been the first school teacher in the county. She died in Buffalo township February 5, 1844.
The first white child born within the confines of Linn county was Maria Osborn, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Osborn, and was born in September, 1838. This statement has often been disputed and cannot be proved with certainty.
THE FIRST GRIST MILL
There has been more or less controversy as to the name of the man who erected the first grist mill in Linn county. Marshall Oxley insists that the first mill of this kind was built by John S. Oxley in 1842-43. It was located in the northwest corner of Linn township on Big creek. The material used was grown in the immediate vicinity. The dimension lumber was hewn out of the forest and the roofing was made of clapboard, then the primitive material used by the pioneers in covering their buildings. The machinery was purchased in Davenport and transported by wagon across the prairies. Before the erection of this mill the early settlers were compelled to take their grists to what was known as the Catfish mill near Dubuque. Frequently it required several days to go to the mill and to return home with the flour. Sometimes the good housewives ran short of flour while the meal was being ground. In such cases they would grind a little corn in the coffee mills, mix it with salt and water, cook it, and thank Providence that they lived in a land flowing with hoe cake, milk and honey.
After the mill had been in successful operation some time two well dressed gentlemen called at the home of the owner and asked to be given entertainment for the night. Their request was cheerfully complied with. Next morning they strolled down to the mill and looked it over. After they had been hospitably entertained and were about to depart they represented that one was a patentee and the other a lawyer and that the owner was using an infringement on their patent. They told him that if he did not pay them forty dollars they would prosecute him to the full extent of the law. He paid them the sum asked but remarked afterwards that he guessed he should have given them a charge of shot.
The mill was operated in successful manner by the miller, Jacob Mann, until August 15, 1848, when he purchased the property for $500. He continued to operate it until it was swept away by the flood of 1851, Mann at this time losing his life in the flood.
A FEW OF THE EARLY ENTRIES TO LAND
A number of people resided in the county and were, so to speak, "squatters" before the land was opened for settlement and entry could be made. A few of the following names and locations will give the reader an idea of some of the old settlers who came here, some of whom resided on their respective claims before entry could be made.
Peter Kepler entered land in section 1-82-5 June 15, 1842; A. M. McCoy, James Huntington, Edward Isham, Horatio Sanford entered land in section 2-82-5 from May 17, 1844, to November 3, 1845.
Mary Ann Doty entered part of section 4-82-5 November 29, 1844; Abner Doty entered land March 11, 1845, in section 3-82-5; William Abbe entered land in section 5-82-5 in 1844; Henry Kepler entered land in the same section two years previously. Jesse H. Holman entered a forty acre tract in section 6 in the same township and range October 12, 1842. During the year 1845 Horatio Sanford, William Abbe and William Johnson entered considerable land in the same locality; also Allison I. Willits and Fred Kinley as early as 1842. James, Joe and Robert Boyd entered considerable land from February, 1843 to 1844 in section 8, while entries were made in section 10 from 1842 to 1844 by John I. Gibson, Oliver Day, Oakley Parker, and Robert Stinson.
During the same period the following entries were made in section 11, to-wit: by Simeon Archer, Oliver Day, John I. Gibson, Nathan Peddycord, and James Kelsey.
In section 13 the following entries were made from February, 1843, to 1845, viz: by Saul Elliott, Gabe Archer, James Bartley, and G. B. Bowman.
In section 14 entries were made from 1843 to 1844 as follows: by James Kelsey, Leonard Platner, John Donahoo, Joe Smith, Ackley Parker, and Reuben Ash.
In section 15 entries were made from February 22, 1843, to September 18, 1844, by Dan Hahn and James Muckalls; and in section 17 by John Stewart and John McLaughlin.
In section 18 during the same period entries were made by Nate P. Wilcox, Meron C. Barnes, and A. J. McKean; George Greene entered a tract in section 29 February 21, 1843. Nearly all of the above described sections seem to have been picked up between the years 1842 and 1844.
A few names appear in various localities as having entered lands in smaller or larger tracts, viz: Hugh Downey, J. G. Berryhill, John J. Gibson, H. W. Sanford, William Abbe, A. J. Willits, and Morgan Reno; a number of those men were not residents of the county at any time as far as is known, with the exception of William Abbe.
In Linn Grove township 83, range 5, the following entries were made:
In sections 1 and 2 by Cyrell M. Webster, Morgan Reno, and William Smythe during the years 1852 and 1853.
In sections 4 and 5 Benjamin Simons, David E. Fussel, Joe S. Butler, and John S. Oxley made entries from 1843 to 1844. In sections 6, 7 and 8 the following entries were made during the years 1842 and 1843: John Milner, Le Grand Byington, Socrates H. Tryon, Jesse Tryon, Dennis Tryon, Alexander Paul, Jacob Mann, John Safely, Jane Safely, Jacob Safely, and Adam Safely.
In section 9 and 11 entries were made during 1844 and 1845 by Ann Whitlatch, Alonzo B. Clark, Morgan Reno, Matt Lynch, Dan I. Finch, and Seward Kyles.
In sections 15, 17, 21 and 22 the following entries were made during the years 1842 and 1844: James S. Varner, Levi Lewis, S. A. Yeisley, John, Thomas and Will Goudy.
In sections 25 to 29 the following entries were made: by John and Andrew Safely, Sam Ellison, John Goudy, George Krow, and Lewis Fink during the years 1843 to 1844. Dan Peet made entry to certain tract of land in section 14 at the same time.
In section 1-85-5 and 6 the following entries were made from 1852 to 1856: by Stephen Conover, Barnett Cole, Nancy H. Hunt, and others. Richard Barber made the first entry in section 4 in 1848, while in section 6 Philip Coffits made entry in June, 1847, and John Smith in November, 1849.
In section 7 Chandler, Ebenezer and Moses C. Jordan entered land from 1846 to 1848. Richard Barber makes an entry in section 9 in 1848. In section 14 Edward Crew, or Crow, enters land in November, 1840 to January, 1845. In section 15 Jacob Mann enters land in May, 1845, followed by another entry made by George Paddington in February, 1846.
In section 23 Absalom Cain makes an entry February, 1846, and in section 25 George C. Perkins and Morton Claypool enters land in 1845. John Peet enters land in section 36 in 1844, and Joseph and Ormus Clark enters land in section 3 in 1844 and 1845.
In section 44, range 5, some of the early entries are by John Peet, Harvey Stone, and Nelson Crow from 1842 to 1845. Sam Kelly enters eighty acres in section 11 in 1840, and about the same time John Gillilan enters land in section 12. John Crow enters one hundred and sixty acres in 1840 in section 13.
Charles Pinkney makes an entry in section 28 in 1840; also another entry in section 29 the same date. In section 32 on August 5, 1840, Nathan Brown, G. H. Robinson, Thomas Sammis, and William Styles make entries. The first entry made in section 33 was made by Benjamin Simons and Abel M. Butler. Charles E. Haskins makes several entries from 1843 to 1848 in section 12-82-5, as well as in sections 1 and 2, Peter Kepler also making entries in January, 1842.
William Abbe made several entries of land in sections 5 and 6 from 1842 to 1843, while Thomas Craig made entries in sections 6 and 7 from 1843 to 1846, as well as Daniel Hahn in section 15.
Israel Mitchell and James Hunter enter land in sections 4 and 5 in 1844, and Herman, or Harman, Boye made several entries in 1854 in sections 24 and 28. In sections 1 and 2-82-2 entries are found as of 1843 and 1844 made by Thomas Craig, Elizabeth D. Waln, Robert Smythe, and Samuel Littrell. In sections 7, 8 and 9 Thomas Crabtree, Abe Stotts, and James Hunter make entries from 1844 to 1846.
Daniel, William, Henry and Elias Rogers make numerous entries in section 14 in 1849; William Davey, Mary S. Legare, Edgar G. Stoney, J. G. Berryhill, and Thomas J. Cox entered this land from 1849 to 1850 in sections 2 and 5-82-7. In section 12-83-7 entries were made in 1843 by S. H. Tryon, J. H. Blackman, M. Mitchell, and E. T. Lewis. In sections 14 and 15 J. Stambaugh, N. and D. Chapman, Ambrose Harlan, H. Weare, Isaac Carroll, George Greene made entries from March 4, 1843, to June, 1844.
John G. McCloud makes an entry in section 16 in December, 1846. In section 17 Robert Ellis entered land July 19, and August 8, 1843, and John Lichtebarger in July of the same year. In section 18 the heirs of Dan Potter convey, and Thomas Gainer and Isaac Lichtebarger about the same time.
In section 21-83-7 Addison Daniels and N. B. Brown entered land March 31, 1843, and George Greene makes entry of land July 13, 1847 and October 31, 1848. From 1843 to 1847 entries were made in section 22 by A. Daniels, N. B. Brown, John G. Cole, Levi Lewis, Joshua Phillips, and Ambrose Harlan. In section 27 Otho S. Bolling, Levi Lewis, and Jason C. Bartholomew made entries from 1843 to 1845. In section 28 entries were made by David W. King, Tom Gainer, and J. M. May from March, 1843, to 1859.
The entries are made earlier in the eastern and southeastern part of the county, and later on the west side of the river and toward the west and northwest; the most entries were made from 1852 to 1859, when there seems to have been a wholesale tide of emigration.
ORGANIZATION OF DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN THE COUNTY
Copy of a paper given the Linn County Historical Society by Miss Mary Durham, daughter of Hon. Samuel W. Durham.
Marion, April 27, 1843
Committee of organization met at Marion, Linn county, Iowa.
Resolved, that a sufficient number of gentlemen in each township be appointed to act as a committee of organization.
Franklin Township--C. C. Haskins, S. Elliott, Robt. Smyth, A. M. Artz, Jno. Wolfe, Jas. Stewart, Benj. De Witt, Henry Kepler.
Linn Township--William T. Gilbert, Sam'l C. Stewart, Ira Sammons, And. Safely, Jno. Scott.
Brown Township--Geo. Perkins, Jas. V. Hill, Isaac Butler, Horace N. Brown, Sam'l Kelly.
Washington Township--Bart Magonigle, Sam'l Lockhart, Ben D. Springer, Wm. B. Davis, Thos. Lockhart, Sr., A. Moats, Wm. Cress, Wm. B. Harrison.
Lafayette--Gilman Clark, Chas. Cantonwine, Daniel Richards, Sam'l Brazier, Jacob Cress.
Putnam--Jno. Barnet, Jno. Hile, Alex Cox.
Marion--M. Strong, Geo. Greene, Iram Wilson, Prior Scott, Perry Oxley, S. H. Tryon, Joel Leverich, John Hunter, Thos. Railsback, S. W. Durham.
Rapids--N. B. Brown, P. W. Earle, Baker, Gainor, Justus Wells, John G. McLoud.
Resolved, that each township send one delegate to Linn convention and those having 100 votes, 2, and 1 for every additional 50.
Resolved, that with order to an organization of the democratic party in Linn County the committee in each township be requested to give due notice to the democratic citizens of their respective townships by written advertisement or otherwise, to meet at some convenient place in their said townships on the first Saturday of June next at 2 o'clock P. M., for the purpose of choosing delegates to attend the Territorial Convention at Iowa City on the 4th Monday in June, and also to appoint delegates to a District Convention, to be held at William L. Gilbert's at such time as may hereafter be agreed upon by the corresponding committees in the counties composing the 8th electoral district, to nominate candidates for Representatives to the Legislature to be supported by the democratic party at the annual election in October next.
Resolved, that a committee of three be appointed.
L. M. STRONG, Prest.
SAM'L W. DURHAM, Sec.