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A view of the Minneapolis campus from the riverbluff in an 1857 sketch. IMAGES COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

It was a cold day in February 1864 when one of the newest members of the Minnesota State Legislature, John Pillsbury, made his way toward what then constituted the University of Minnesota: a single, half-finished building that, in the not-too-distant future, would be called Old Main. For now, it was just the “university building,” and it was located in Pillsbury’s East Hennepin senate district above the Mississippi River, on property downriver from the commercial district along Main Street in St. Anthony. It sat near the center of a pentagon-shaped lot of some 25 acres and was isolated from both the flow of river traffic and Main Street commerce.

Along with three other state senators, the recently elected Pillsbury came to inspect the condition of the school, which had been closed since the start of the Civil War three years earlier. In fact, so little attention had been paid to the University in recent times that the first thing Pillsbury and his colleagues noticed as they approached was that the building was occupied by squatters. A family had taken up quarters and invited their animals inside to join them for the winter. In the basement, Pillsbury and company found one room full of turkeys and another heaped with hay. A fine wood floor in the structure’s main hall had been used as a base for wood-chopping, and now hundreds of ax blade marks peppered the boards.

That wasn’t all. The original design of the university building was intended to  have two wings coming off a central structure, but when money ran out due to the economic depression beginning in 1857, construction stopped after only the west wing was built. Workers simply boarded up the unfinished side of the building, and the elements poured in through the patch, further damaging the structure.

The University of Minnesota “was in very sad condition,” Pillsbury wrote years later, recalling this visit to a gathering of alumni. The designs of the original founders of the University had been thwarted by their own grandiosity and the unpredictability of the American economy. The inspection of the campus by Pillsbury and his colleagues, however, signaled a turning point in the campus’s existence. For a slew of reasons— including because the school was in his senate district, because he had just been asked by the governor to serve on the Board of Regents of the University, because he understood first hand the root cause of the college’s disrepair (Pillsbury held one of the University’s many debts), and because he had committed himself in a business, political, and social sense to the affairs of the new state of Minnesota— the good senator decided it was high time the state did something about the deplorable circumstances of its University.

Old Main was designed to resemble the “palace of a minor monarch” and have two wings added later.

Just a few days after that inspection, legislation was introduced in the senate that gave Pillsbury and two other “special regents” the power to sell University land with the intention of settling its debt and someday reopening Minnesota’s state college as a genuine institution of higher learning.

No high drama followed, no fantastically wealthy guardian angel stepped forward to save the school. The rebirth and invigoration of the University of Minnesota in the years after the Civil War began with a balancing of the books.

Back to the beginning
The men and women who founded the state of Minnesota 150 years ago this May were nothing if not visionaries. They had to be. In a vastly unsettled region where most of the Euro-American newcomers lived in little ribbons of land on or near the banks of the Mississippi, St. Croix, and Minnesota rivers, some of these pioneers dreamed of a great state university that would not only educate and enlighten the area’s young people, but would serve as a reservoir of talent and intellect for Minnesota for generations.

The original founders of the University—names like Ramsey, Steele, Rice, Ames, Neill, and North—were founders of the state, as well. In 1851, before Minnesota was born, when barely 10,000 white people had populated the territory, legislators created a board of regents, leased lands in St. Anthony, and began construction of a first university building (not Old Main) that actually opened as a preparatory school in November of that year. They were encouraged in their endeavors by the U.S. Congress, which had granted the prospective university almost 100,000 acres of territorial land. This acreage would be the University’s endowment for years to come.

In the heady days of the early to mid-1850s, as more people poured into the region and the price of land escalated, it didn’t seem beyond the reach of Minnesotans to expand the University and build a grander future. The number of students at the prep school grew and overcrowded that first university building. A new plot of land became available, “sufficiently removed from the noise and confusion of [St. Anthony’s] business” community to make it appealing as a quiet college campus, according to The St. Anthony Express. The legislature authorized its board of regents to buy the acreage above the river and begin building an elegant new structure that would be the center of a busy campus in the midst of a thriving state.

The building would have the grandeur “of a palace of a minor monarch of the 19th century,” according to University historian James Gray. There would be two wings off a four-story central hall, with extensions branching off of these wings. Construction proceeded piecemeal, one wing at a time, with

John S. Pillsbury led the effort to revive the University of Minnesota.

work beginning on the west wing of Old Main in 1857. It ended with the economic crash in 1858, before any building had started on the balancing half of the “palace.” By that time, the bill for the work done at the new University building had already reached $50,000, a figure that was daunting enough in pre-crash financial terms but looked like the mortgage on the Taj Mahal after the downturn.

The Congressional land grant, which had been such an encouraging endowment to the founders of the University a few years earlier, was now simply land that no one in the area had the money to buy. The University had no other assets. Furthermore, the economic downturn had left the state with no means to step in and assist the school, even if it had been so inclined.

The prep school (the University of Minnesota was still not an institution of higher education) operated in the new building for a couple of years before the war, but bills were left unpaid and interest on the school’s debt mounted. When the Civil War arrived, any remaining attention to the University’s plight was diverted by the necessities of war. The debt continued to grow as time passed, and squatters and turkeys took up residence in the partially boarded-up university building. By the time John Pillsbury and his cohorts visited, the state university bill stood at about $150,000 and climbing, and the hopes of getting a school started anytime soon were slim to none.

In fact, one notion for cutting losses was to give the property over to a state institution for the insane, an idea no one thought was particularly nutty.

In debt and indebted
Pillsbury was not yet the giant of Minnesota affairs that he would become, though he was heading in that direction. The famed flour business that bears the family name had not yet been founded, and Pillsbury’s political career was nascent (that state senate seat was his first public office; he would subsequently be elected governor three times). A transplanted Yankee, Pillsbury settled down in St. Anthony in 1855 and opened a hardware store that did well until the economic woes of ’57. Pillsbury lost money in the downturn but managed to rebuild his business in the years after, earning the respect of the community and of East Coast financiers, by the dutiful way he repaid his debts. It was in this context that Pillsbury was tapped by the state to lead efforts at resurrecting the University.

The federal land grant turned out to be the means by which the school’s indebtedness was finally retired. Toward the end of the Civil War and in the years immediately afterward, Minnesota land values began to rise. Pillsbury and the two special regents appointed with him by the state legislature, John Nicols and Orlando Merriman,

The victim of fire more than once, Old Main burned beyond repair in 1904.

took advantage of this movement to divest a portion of the University’s land holdings. They also were able to collect stumpage fees from a number of lumberers who had been cutting timber on University land without compensating the college. With the funds accrued from these sales and fees, they slowly began shrinking the debt.

By June 1867, Pillsbury could report to the legislature that “the last claim against the university has been paid . . . [and its] slate is clean.” Sixteen thousand acres of the congressional endowment had been sold piecemeal to make the bills go away, but go away they did, and the regents wasted no time in beginning plans to reopen the school.

Within weeks, W.W. Washburn was hired as principal for the school, and Charles Chute, the 15-year-old son of a former regent, Richard Chute, was enrolled as the first student and enlisted to find more students of his age around town to fill the school rolls. Twenty were needed and 32 were found. They included at least 13 girls and the two students who would turn out to be the first graduates of the University of Minnesota (as opposed to its prep school). These were Warren Eustis and Henry Williamson, who entered the school that fall.

But there were lumps in the gravy. While the debt was paid off, there was no money to pour into the new enterprise, which meant, among other things, that the University building had not yet been repaired. Between the ouster of the squatters and the planned reopening of the school, not much had been done to improve the condition of the structure. According to an account written by Charles Chute years later, instead of turkeys occupying Old Main, it was now squirrels that had streamed in through the disrepair. In addition, the side was still boarded-up and local boys had used the windows to practice their sharp-shooting, knocking out most of the panes. The necessary repairs to open the building were made, however, and in September 1867, the state university reopened for the first time in years. Still a little wobbly in its finances, but open.

Another potential problem arose when efforts began to open a second state school—an agricultural college—in Glencoe, Minnesota. With the campus in St. Anthony just getting off the ground again and in such a tenuous condition, a competitor school—clamoring for a new pool of federal land grants offered through the 1862 Morrill Act—would surely bury one or the other of the emerging colleges in the battle.

But Pillsbury and his allies were able to stymie these efforts at diluting the state’s emerging higher education efforts, in part through Pillsbury’s donation of a plot of land near the St. Anthony school property on which a university farm could be built and agriculture taught. The state

William Watts Folwell, the University’s first president, served from 1869 to 1884.

legislature dutifully passed legislation that reorganized the University, creating a board of nine regents, and guaranteeing that agricultural college grant moneys would go to the one and only state university, in St. Anthony.

Now all that was left was to make what was still a preparatory school into an actual degree-conferring college. To the practical-minded men, like Pillsbury, who had just led the University out of debt and back into existence, the matter of getting an institution of higher education up and running was a practical concern as well. The Board of Regents would hire a faculty and a college president who had experience in these matters, and the University would simply proceed as colleges were meant to.

Pillsbury and others on the board had never even attended college. Best to let the experts run the educational side of things. The most important function of the board would be grasping the school’s purse strings, and this would be an exceedingly tight grip, given the history of the University of Minnesota.

Grit and grandiosity
In 1869, a university faculty was hired (composed, at least in part, of qualified professors). Then a young Civil War veteran named William Watts Folwell was appointed as the first president of University of Minnesota. A graduate of Hobart College in his native upstate New York, Folwell had served as a professor of mathematics at his alma mater before the war and took a similar post at Kenyon College after service. He was entertaining a number of academic offers when he decided to come to Minnesota.

Folwell was not only a scholar of the first order but a man with a vision of what higher education might be in a frontier state like Minnesota. Soon after he arrived in the state, he gave a remarkable speech at the state legislature in which he outlined what would turn out to be the future of state higher education in Minnesota. He saw a statewide system that would provide resources for the citizenry of the region and serve as a fount of talent and knowledge for business, government, the arts, industry, and agriculture. It was a dream of higher education that the early territorial leaders—many of whom were still around to hear Folwell—could understand and appreciate.

Of course, the state in 1869 was still rough around the edges. It would be many years before the dreams of a great university were achieved. The first 15 freshman in the University’s history enrolled that fall—18 years after the school first opened—joining some 130 prep students. And Folwell’s first duty turned out to be helping the workmen hired to complete the boarded-up wall of Old Main.

Tim Brady is a St. Paul–based writer and frequent contributor to Minnesota.