The University of Nevada in Reno looks good for its age. This year marks its 150th anniversary.
You can trace the university’s origins to 1862. That year, a congressman from Vermont, Justin Morrill, introduced the Land Grant College Act. The goal was to enhance higher education in the United States. But Morrill and his fellow Republicans also wanted to expand knowledge in certain areas. So they came up with a deal. Each state would get 30,000 acres of public land per member of Congress. In that case, even the smallest state would have 90,000 acres. They would get the land by taking it from Native Americans. The bill passed and President Abraham Lincoln signed it.
The state could use the land or sell it to create a land-grant college. The law said they would exist, “without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts.” The first state to go along with the plan was Iowa, which expanded an existing school into what is now Iowa State University. The first totally new college was Kansas State. The land-grant colleges and universities concentrated on teaching technology and new techniques in farming.
Technology included mining, By 1873, the year of the Big Bonanza in Virginia City, Nevada’s governor was Lewis R. Bradley, a rancher from Elko. Bradley and the legislature decided to take advantage of the Morrill Act, and create an institution for Nevada. The mechanical art it would focus on would be mining.
On October 12, 1874, the University Preparatory School opened in Elko with seven students. They had a bell that rang to notify them it was time for class. Today it’s at Elko High School’s old gym. The bell moved to Reno along with the school, which had been renamed Nevada State University in 1881. Classes began in 1886 in Morrill Hall, now the oldest building on the UNR campus, with 35 students. Enrollment wouldn’t pass a thousand until 1936, when Nevada’s population was only about 100,000. By then, it had become the University of Nevada.
In the early years, it was a smaller campus with fewer faculty and students, but it had its share of legendary figures. Its first new faculty member and librarian in Reno was Hannah Clapp, who had founded Nevada’s first private school. Joseph Stubbs was president for 20 years and started extension work in rural areas, and pushed for more high schools to train future university students. James Church taught classics and fine arts, but he became a pioneer in snow science during his association with the university, which spanned more than 60 years. James Scrugham taught engineering and became a dean, which must
have been great training for him to become governor, congressman, and senator. One of the first history professors, Anne Martin, later made history as a woman suffragist and United States Senate candidate. Walter Clark served as president for 20 years and his son joined the English faculty. Walter Van Tilburg Clark wrote The Ox-Bow Incident and the finest novel of Reno, The City of Trembling Leaves, in addition to editing the diaries of Alf Doten, a Comstock journalist.
There’s a lot more to the history of the University of Nevada, Reno. More on that next time.