Allie and Kansas State Agricultural College

 Part 4 in a series on schooling and my ancestors

     In 1875 more young women continued their education in “female seminaries” and increasingly, in colleges. But to what end? People were increasingly questioning college curriculum and its purpose for men. Since the founding of Harvard in 1636, American colleges taught a classical liberal arts education with Latin and Greek as key subjects. College was for men who wanted to be ministers, doctors, and lawyers. 

     But America had changed dramatically with industrialization and urbanization, and to a wage-earning economy that demanded new occupations and skills. Society struggled with the problem of single women or widows being unable to support a family on the meager earnings from the occupations considered acceptable for women.

     What should college be? And for whom? 

     Alice “Allie” Hurlburt was a pioneer, of sorts. In 1875 she was 22 and arrived on the campus of Kansas State Agricultural College in Manhattan as a freshman. Allie was the daughter of Talcott Hurlburt, a farmer and ardent Congregationalist. In 1867 Talcott moved his family from Indiana to a farm just outside Emporia, Kansas. It was founded just ten years earlier. Kansas State Agriculture College was also a new institution when they arrived in the young state. It was the first college created after the passage of the Morrill Act. 

Morrill Act and the Creation of Kansas State

     Congressman Justin Morrill of Vermont sponsored the Land Grant College Act, which became known as the Morrill Act, to establish “at least one college in every state upon a sure and perpetual foundation, accessible to all, but especially to the sons of toil, where all needful science for the practical avocations of life should be taught…” He also said that classical studies should not be ignored, but agriculture and mechanical arts should be elevated to serious study. 

     These were new ideas as college was for the affluent, the elite - not the “sons of toil.” They required proficiency in Greek and Latin to enter. Practical instruction - job training - was not what they taught. They were also not research institutions as we expect major colleges to be today. They taught what one historian described as what we already know.

     Abraham Lincoln signed the act into law in 1862. It provided federal funding to colleges for the first time in the form of grants of 30,000 acres of federal land per congressman that each state had in 1860. Sadly, the acres came from over 200 tribal nations who were forced to give up their land. In eastern states where there weren’t huge swaths of federal land, the state was given land out west.Timber land in Wisconsin, for example, helped fund Cornell University. 

     Kansas was the first to open a land grant college because a private Methodist college, Bluemont Central College, offered the school’s three-story building and 100 of its acres. From the start, it was coeducational, admitting 26 women and 26 men - only the second public institution to open to both. 

     In 1875, the year Allie arrived on campus,  the college moved to its present location. The country was in a deep economic depression. Kansas was only one year removed from the grasshopper plague and severe drought which devastated the state the year before, with lingering effects in 1875. Faculty salaries were slashed. Since the founding of the college, the legislature was slow to take into account that funding the college through sale of land to build an endowment involved selling land and waiting years for enough money to accrue. In 1875 the land hadn’t all been sold. Some years they appropriated zero funds. Other years they appropriated only enough to pay for salaries – and for two of those years did so on the condition that the money was a loan. 

     Allie came to a raw, inadequately provisioned campus. This was in contrast to the well-established Western Female Seminary in Ohio, where her older sister Retta graduated in 1867. [See my blog post “The Female College" for more on the seminary.] After a decade of debate, the curriculum that Allie studied was dramatically different than her sister’s, and one that was controversial. 

A New College Curriculum

     The Morrill Act required a “practical” curriculum that included agricultural instruction for the “industrial classes.” What did that mean? What should it look like? Should a liberal arts curriculum also be offered? Should it be merely a trade school, teaching what we now call vocational ed? There were those who, relying upon the language of the Morrill Act, believed the college should "teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanical arts" rather than the actual practice of agriculture.” (Emphasis mine.)

     A historian of the college noted that in Europe there were two distinct types of agricultural schools that had been developed, “one for the youth of the landholding upper-classes, in which subjects of importance in agricultural management were studied in connection with regular university courses; the other especially for the sons of the farmers who actually tilled and fertilized the soil, and fed and butchered the stock.” In Kansas the second model won out under John Anderson, who took over the presidency of the college in 1873. This, however, was not the vision of Justin Morrill. 

      The entire faculty was asked to resign, and only one member was hired back. The new faculty was asked to design all-new curriculum for a new purpose. Anderson clarified what he believed the curriculum should be, calling it a “radical” change. He assisted the board of Regents in writing the following:

The object of this institution is to impart a liberal and practical education to those who desire to qualify themselves for the actual practice of agriculture, the mechanic trades, or industrial arts. Prominence shall be given to agriculture and these arts in the proportion that they are severally followed in the State of Kansas.

Prominence shall be given to the several branches of learning which relate to agriculture and the mechanic arts according to the directness and value of their relation.

Thorough instruction shall be given in the English language. Neither Latin, German, nor French will be required as a part of either the full or partial courses, but shall be optional with the pupil or parent.

     

     Anderson wasted no time in making this happen. The college would be a trade school. Industrial work in agriculture and horticulture and in the mechanical department, which had been inaugurated by the preceding administration, was continued. Instruction in telegraphy and printing was introduced. The report stated that "Mrs. H. C. Cheseldine was employed as superintendent early in December, and classes have been formed in sewing, dress-making, and millinery. Sewing machines will be in readiness at the opening of next term." The statistics concerning classes showed an enrollment of twelve in dressmaking, fifty-four in telegraphy, thirty-seven in printing, thirty-five in carpentry, ten in blacksmithing, five in painting, and six in wagon making. By the time Allie came to the college, Mrs. Cheseldine was replaced by Mrs. Mary E. Cripps. 

     It would be left to future presidents in Kansas and elsewhere to create what we take for granted today. As college historian Willard wrote, “a type of institution which is not a classical college nor a trade school, but one in which science, culture, and industrial arts are blended in the production of a new type of education; one in which vocational efficiency in agricultural and mechanical industries is attained through intelligent application of the facts of modern science, while at the same time the individual as a person is developed in his physical, mental, and spiritual capacities to the end that life shall be much more than merely making a living.”

     But in the meantime, in Allie’s day, the purpose of the college changed from providing a professional education to a vocational one. Soon, the president boasted that the college contained “no Latin or Greek rubbish or useless ‘abstract’ mathematics, and no fancy ‘ologies’ and ‘osophies.’” 

Women’s Education

     What to do about women, though? President Anderson wrestled with this. He said, “chances are 99 in a hundred that every Kansas girl will have more or less to do with housekeeping.” He was quite harsh as to the curriculum at seminaries, though it’s highly likely his wife attended one. He said they seemed to assume a woman’s work would be discussing literature, speaking a smattering of French, executing operettas and attempting to copy paintings. Meanwhile, her husband would have to be used to bad coffee and bad bread, with a dead flower garden and a wife who didn’t know how to sew a button on his shirt.

     At another point, he conceded that for some time female seminaries had been offering women the same classical education as men, not the fluffy finishing school he described. What was the result? Was this an attempt to make her a mental male? “...is her home warmer and brighter with the glow of wifely love, of motherly tenderness, of all that constitutes the radiance of womanliness?” he asked. Or ten years after she graduated, had she achieved the same professional position as a man? If only we could know, he said dramatically, how much this "male" education of women caused the rising divorce rate, “domestic incapacity, the anguish, disease and death of wives, the disappointment, sorrow, dissipation, adultery and maladies of husbands; for the enfeebled constitutions, stunted minds, frozen affections, mangled and distorted souls of children, which fresh from the arms of the All Father, bright in promise and glorious possibilities, have been murdered by the slow torture of womanly incompetence or neglect.” All this horror because women received the same education as men!

     

     Anderson graduated from Miami University where his father was the college president. It was home to Western Female Seminary and not far from Ohio Female College, both of whom believed they were preparing women for work as missionaries and teachers, not “parlor ornaments” for wealthy husbands. Husbands like Anderson, who had three live-in servants on the 1870 and 1880 census. 

     In the college handbook he wrote in 1874 for Kansas State, he went on for thirty pages about what a woman’s college education should be. He was a firm believer in the “separate spheres” theory then dominant in America. He wrote how men’s mind and women’s minds were as different as a trout’s and a lark’s. Perception and feeling were dominant in the woman’s brain and reasoning and logic in the male brain. Further, she was hampered by periodic "physiological changes" that affected her thinking - a clear reference to her menstrual cycle. At those times, her brain was weaker. Therefore, it made no sense to give both the same instruction.

     But while he disparaged the female seminaries, his point was that the college should prepare women for paid work. What he could not imagine was what that could be besides sewing, teaching and telegraphy. He knew many single women eked out meager livings plying a needle; he thought learning advanced sewing skills like pattern making would help them earn more. When he hired a woman to create the first department of sewing, she was paid less than a third of what the male faculty were paid.

Allie’s Experience

 

     When Allie attended, the college consisted of five buildings, including a barn and a blacksmith shop with two forges. It had a 185-acre farm and a 30-acre experimental nursery with fruit orchards, among other fruits. The telegraph department had four miles of line and 25 sets of machinery. The sewing department had four sewing machines.

     Allie had a radically different experience than her sister Retta at Western Female Seminary. For one thing, Retta was at a cloistered all-girls’ school. Students lived in the main college building under the watchful chaperoning of faculty. There were no such facilities at Kansas State and students boarded with families. They paid an average of $3 to $4 weekly, plus 75 cents for laundry, and textbooks ran from $2.50 to $5 per term. 

     An 1875 school catalog during Allie’s time of study detailed the Farmer’s Education and the Mechanic’s Education. But half the students were women, and they weren’t being trained to be a farmer or a mechanic. What was there for them? Their coursework was nearly identical to the farmer’s course of study, at least at first glance.

     However, it differed sharply upon reading course descriptions. Where a young man would be learning about rotation of crops and the production of manure in his senior year, for example, women would be learning about cheese-making, the packing and preserving of butter and the manufacture of condensed milk. Men would study organic chemistry and women, “Household Chemistry,” which involved the chemistry of cooking and the ripening and preservation of foods. Taught by Mrs. Mary E. Cripps, Superintendent of the Sewing and Cooking Department, this included a “completely furnished kitchen laboratory” that provided “drill in the art of cooking.” Instruction also fell along traditional gender roles in the industrial department, where men learned things such as carpentry, cabinet making, blacksmithing and wagon-making. For women the choices included dress-making, telegraphy, instrumental music, scroll-sawing, photography and printing. Students were expected to choose one to specialize in and demonstrate their competence in a ‘recital.’

     “Young ladies” also received a course of lectures in hygiene by Mrs. Cripps, and a series of lectures on the farm economy suitable for the farmer’s wife.

     One had to be at least 14 in order to attend, and pass a series of admission tests. Then students were tested monthly to “sift out incompetent and indolent pupils.” Daily chapel attendance was required at 8:30 a.m. and church on Sunday. Tuition was free. 

     Gender differences prevailed with expenses, too. “A faithful boy skilled in farm work” could expect to earn at least half his expenses working on the college farm. There was no such option for the young ladies.

     The rules were quite simple. Quoted directly they are:

 

1. Behave as a true man or woman should, at all times and at all places.

2. Attend to all your business promptly, thoroughly and courteously; and vigorously let alone that of other people.

3. Penalty: “Leave!”

 

      In Allie’s time, even with free tuition, graduating classes were between two to six students. There were about 180 students in the entire college. Even with the change in the college’s mission, having a year of college set one in an elite group. She probably felt more outfitted to be a good, modern farmer’s wife, and she was now a very desirable candidate for teaching.

Kansas State After Allie – and Allie’s Life After College

     In 1879, after President Anderson was elected to the Kansas State Legislature, the next president, George Fairchild, set about making changes that shifted Kansas State away from a trade school to the modern concept of college that we have today. He regarded education, not merely as a preparation for a trade or profession, but as disclosing and strengthening the powers of the individual in any line of work. He believed that the College was "not so much to make men farmers as to make farmers men." He supported Mrs. Cripps and kept what would come to be considered home economics at the college at a time when other land grant colleges dropped this experiment. By 1890 he required classes in many of the “ologies” Anderson disparaged, such as zoology, entomology and geology, in a balanced liberal arts and practical education.

     Between 1873 and 1882, nineteen women graduated from Kansas State; most were like Allie and did not. Unsurprisingly, Allie would be both a farmer's wife and homemaker, and a teacher, the expected roles for a woman. A small item in Emporia’s Weekly News-Democrat announced in 1878 that she would be teaching at Elm Creek. In 1879 Emporia’s Evening News announced she’d be teaching in District 42, known as the Wheeler District. She and her sister Retta received top scores on a teacher’s examination at the Normal Institute in 1879, probably in part due to the superior education they had received compared to girls with a only a common school education.

        In 1881 she married Henry N. Roberts in her parents’ home, as was the custom. The newspaper item announcing their marriage said they left overland for Washington Territory immediately. His obituary said they went with a “party of western-bound immigrants.” There, they settled in Rosalia.

  Why Rosalia? In 2012 the town in the southeastern part of the state was facing “declining financial conditions” according to a state auditor’s report. “Historic, picturesque, and struggling to survive,” is the title of one blog post about the town of about 550. Not only do trains no longer pass through, but in 1975 the state highway bypassed the town, and the population declined. Like many small farming towns, it’s hard to keep young people. But it wasn’t always the case, of course. It’s easy to forget the sparsely populated little farm towns of today, with no public transportation, were once bustling places full of promise and trains.

  Rosalia is the “Gateway to the Palouse Byway,” the Palouse being a distinct ecological region encompassing parts of southeastern Washington and north central Idaho. It has fertile hills and prairies that made it good for growing wheat, creating a boom in the 1880s with an abundance of vital rail lines.

      Allie and Henry left family and friends to homestead in this distant place. Although as a married woman she could give up teaching and was expected to, according to her obituary, in 1882 Allie was the first to teach school in Spring Valley. 

      The Roberts must have discovered that farming was unusually labor-intensive on the dune-like hills of the Palouse. Allie and Henry gave up and moved into the town of Rosalia itself. On the 1900 and 1910 census, Henry worked as a salesman and a grain buyer. In 1913 he was elected to the Rosalia City Council. He died in 1914 in what was said to be an accidental shooting at his own hands as he was preparing to go duck hunting. Allie outlived him by twenty-five years.

Note: Here’s where Allie fits in my family tree. Her father, Talcott Ledyard Hurlburt, was the son of Gurdon Hurtburt and Rhoda Barber. Rhoda was the sister of Elizabeth “Betsey” Barber, my fourth great-grandmother. My third great-grandfather, Myron Fitch Barbour, was Talcott’s first cousin.

Sources:

     Gunn, Virginia. “Industrialists Not Butterflies: Women’s Higher Education at Kansas State Agricultural College, 1873-1882.” Kansas History 18 (Spring 1995): 2-17.

     Handbook of the Kansas State Agricultural College, Manhattan, Kansas: Office of the Nationalist, 1874. 

     Willard, Julius Terrass. History of the Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science, Manhattan: Kansas State Universities, 1940. 

     Willard, Julius Terrass, “Bluemont Central College, The Forerunner of Kansas State College,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 6, (May 1945), pp. 323-357.

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