Where did farmers get new agricultural knowledge prior to 1862? Sadly, there were not many places one could go to be educated about agriculture. This started to change in 1862 when Congress passed the Morrill Act which resulted in the establishment of a land-grant college in every state to teach agriculture and the mechanical arts. At this point in time colleges focused on the liberal arts; so it was refreshing to have a collection of colleges that emphasized science as applied to agriculture and the mechanical arts. The reason they were called land-grant colleges is because Congress provided grants of land to be sold by each state to support these new colleges.
The members of this year’s leadership cohort of the North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund Commission Agricultural Leadership Development Program learned about land-grant colleges in a presentation I made on October 6. Some were surprised to learn that North Carolina State University came into existence in 1887 because the first North Carolina college to be given land-grant status (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) failed miserably as an agricultural college.
