Early Days at Michigan State University: Why the Hatch Act Was Important

The first students at Michigan Agricultural College spent three hours a day clearing forests and draining swamps.

The land-grant universities were established in 1862 with the passage of Morrill Act. But at that time, agricultural science did not exist—there was no such thing as agronomy, horticulture, dairy science, or soil science. The land-grant agricultural colleges were envisioned more along the lines of what we would call vocational education today, with the goal of teaching the working class farming and mechanical skills.

William J. Beal’s book History of the Michigan Agricultural College provides a fascinating look at the early days of what is now Michigan State University, which was established in 1855 by the state of Michigan and became the state’s Morrill land-grant in 1863. Unlike some of the other land-grant recipients (like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which happily accepted Morrill Act funds but graduated only one agricultural student before 1885), Michigan Agricultural College actually did teach agriculture in the 1860s. But the student experience was a little different than it is today.

When MAC first opened, tuition was free for Michigan residents, but students had to spend three hours every day doing manual labor. Since the “campus” was mostly virgin forest and swampland in 1855, the students spent most of those work hours cutting down and burning trees, rooting out stumps, and ditching swamps. In today’s language, they were clearcutting old-growth forests and destroying wetlands. Forestry and conservation were unheard of.

As the cleared area grew and the industrious students cleared out the burned snags, they were finally able to start doing some farming. At first, Michigan farmers ridiculed the agricultural attempts of their new college, with some justification. One hapless student, unable to get proper instructions on seeding rates, planted a large field of turnips so thickly that the plants never formed roots, rendering them useless as a crop. It didn’t help that malaria was endemic in Michigan swamps at the time and 70 percent of the student body spent every other day in bed with the “fever and ague.”

All that changed in 1887, when Congress passed the Hatch Act establishing an agricultural experiment station in each state. In 1890, the Second Morrill Act more than doubled the amount of federal money given to the land grants, adding the stipulation that people of color couldn’t be discriminated against in the application process. The Southern states lobbied to get a workaround clause inserted that allowed them to establish separate land-grant colleges for Black students, with the federal funds distributed “equitably” between the two—which in practice meant that the historically Black colleges and universities were chronically underfunded because most of the money went to the white institutions. Since the northern states didn’t discriminate in admissions, they applied all their federal funds to their existing land-grants.

For all practical purposes, these two pieces of legislation—the Hatch Act and the Second Morrill Act—marked the true beginning of agricultural research in the United States. With the rise of the agricultural experiment stations, agricultural science really started to flower. Most departments of agronomy, horticulture, and soil science were founded between 1887 and 1905, and the universities built substantial colonnaded brick and concrete buildings to house them, many of which still stand today. The Morrill Act was just the prologue to the rise of agricultural science in the United States. The story really starts with the Hatch Act.