Iowa State University - Bomb Yearbook (Ames, IA)

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at- it became a deep-rooted habit which it took many years of agitation and discussion to remove. Sixteen months from this opening day which we are now cele- brating I first saw these grounds. It was a raw February day on which I reached the quite forlorn looking village of Ames. It im- pressed me with its treelessness and small houses with no shrubs and no dooryards, as a village which was all out of doors, and lonesome and unprotected. The drive over the rough, mud road, a rickety bridge and the bottoms of Squaw Creek, was not re-assuring. The main approach to the college just at the base of the hill, and up through the barn yard, by the old Farm House, and then across the fields to the president ' s house might have dampened the ardor of the new comer. But he was young and inexperienced, and withal was an optimist, and he had faith and went forward. What a blessed thing is faith and optimism of youth? It is the faith that removes mountains. It is the optimist that always sees the golden margin of the cloud, no matter how dark and threatening the cloud may be. Look back with me nearly thirty-nine years, and see this campus as the young botanist saw it. There were no drives, no walks, no paths, no smooth lawn, and only a few small trees. There was the large building — The College we called it, the Farm House, a barn, some sheds, the president ' s house, and Professor Jones ' house, these houses being away off on the prairie seemingly a long distance from the center of activity. Probably the present generation has forgotten the story of these first houses for the faculty: — how the early trustees, being of an experimental turn of mind determined to build them of concrete, and actually had the president ' s house nearly completed, when one fair day it crushed down, carrying down with it the astonished carpenters at work on the roof. For- tunately no lives were lost, and the trustees gave up their ad- vocacy of the concrete of that time for the building of houses. The remains of the walls of the two houses were gathered up and used for the foundation of the drive that for so many years had run from College Hall southeast towards the present entrance. If you are inclined to search for relics, go and dig into the foundation of this old driveway and you will find fragments of the concrete walk that fell nearly forty years ago. That was the day of the old time labor system. The law estab- lishing the college required every student to work not less than three hours a day in the summer and two in the winter. And so it was averaged, and every one was compelled to work two hours and a half a day. The students were assorted into squads of con- venient size, and over each was a squad master who collected his men, took them to their work, kept them at it, and returned them and their tools at the end of the work period. For many of the young men it was slavery, that is unvoluntary servitude. They were paid ten cents per hour if they worked faithfully and broke vvw ,. ,,,

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■v-;: .•:••.•■: ■ I pass over the years of waiting to the day forty years ago this morning when the college doors opened to receive its first in- stallment of students. There were big, awkward country boys, two score or so of them, and a score or so of rosy-cheeked, shy girls from the farms and the little towns. How strange it all seemed. There were no old students to greet the new comer. There were no traditions. There were no stories about students or faculty to be handed down with embellishments from upper classmen to lower classmen. Everybody was equally new, and inexperienced. And on the other side was the new faculty. There was the dig- nified and polished President Welch, a veteran teacher elsewhere, but new to Iowa, and to the particular education represented by this college. There was Professor Jones of somewhat severe mien, and with every evidence of being a vigorous, driving personality. And there was the bland Dr. Foote who was to lay plans for a department of chemistry, the energetic Dr. Townsend, and the lov- able Miss Beaumont. It was a faculty small in numbers but remark- able in ability. These were the pioneers who represented the long line of teachers that have followed in the path broken here on the open prairie. And so the work began, a new faculty gave instruction to a new student body. There were only the most meager facilities for instruction. There were blackboards, some benches, some chairs. There was a museum, small in size, but large in the number of dreadful specimens which it contained. With what feelings of horror must those innocent youths first have looked upon the numberless bottles of preserved snakes, the boxes of bats, impaled beetles, and tarantulas, and the fierce-looking panthers and wild cats. It must have been an education in itself for these unsophisticated boys and girls to have spent an hour in this chamber of horrors, learning the lesson that art is sometimes greater than nature. In this young college there were no laboratories, no shops, and only a small library. It was a day of small things. The faculty lived in the building, with the students, the classrooms, the kitchen and the dining room. With the exception of the farm superin- tendent, and the live stock, the whole coUege was housed in one building. It was economical surely, and it saved time for students and faculty. No one lost time in getting to his classes. But this idyllic life was not destined to last long. The cold north- west winds swept down upon the college and its band of teachers and pupils, so snugly ensconced in the big building. There were no trees to check the force of those chilly blasts, and in spite of the efforts of the old fireman the few little furnaces down in the cellar could not and would not keep the cold from creeping in. And right here was the beginning of the winter vacation so long a custom in the college. Finding that it was impossible to keep warm during the winter the college work was suspended until spring, and everybody went home. And this was repeated again and again

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no tools. The makeshifts, the excuses, the evasions, that were re- sorted to in order to avoid this daily labor would, if written, fill a volume. At what did they work? The girls worked in the kitchen and dining room, while the boys mopped the floors, hoed weeds in the garden, milked the cows, worked in the barns at odd jobs, worked in the fields, cut down trees in the fringe of forest northwzst of the college, dug ditches, helped cart away the piles of dirt excavated from the cellars of the wings of the college building. Yes, every- body worked in those first years, and the practice was given up only when there were so many students and so little work that there v as not enough to go around. You can maintain a manual labor system only when there is much rather simple labor to be pjrfor.Tied, and not a great many persons to do it. Then too, that was before the rise of the laboratory and the shop as parts of a college equip- ment. In these, nowadays, the student works, and with far greater effectiveness educationally. It is far better for a boy to spend his afternoons in the soils laboratory, the dairy laboratory, the botanical or the horticultural laboratory, than for him to dig ditches, chop wood, hoe weeds, or milk cows. It was characteristic of the president that while he grappled with some things and compelled them to yield to his will, there were others that he allowed to have their own way, and to effect their own solution. A notable instance was his treatment of the question of the admission of young women to the college. No special pro- vision had been made for them, but when they came they were assigned to rooms and to such classes as they were able to enter. There was no course of study for young women, the two courses being the Agriculural course, and the Mechanical course, and in these the young woman were registered. Some men would have kept them out of these quite unfeminine lines of study; others would have catered to the evident intent of the people of the state to send their daughters to the college. But president Welch simply waited, and watched for developments. So the first girls in the college went into the same classes as the boys. And this not discouraging their sisters from coming to college, when he found that they were in earnest and meant to claim a permanent place in it, he helped the faculty to block out a course in General Science for women. In it were such culture studies as history, literature and language, and that the young women of the state appreciated the value of the boon thus granted them is attested by their rapid increase in numbers. He spread no attractive intellectual feast before the young women of the state to tempt them to enter the young college and swell the numbers of its students; he chose rather to wait and see whether they really wanted to enter the college. How sharply this contrasts with what I frequently see in college management where the at- tempt is made to create a demand by means of optimistically written circulars, lavishly illusrated by beautiful half tone reproductions of