274 History of Universities
Springfield, the remote little fur-trading post where the
founder of the Rice Institute was born, one hundred and
seventy years later.
This instance of the devotion of a poor people to learning
has been repeated again and again in the history of American
colleges and universities. In some cases, the first college
building has been put up by voluntary labor, with donated
materials; in others, the money has been raised from the
pennies of Sunday school children, the collection plates of
country churches, and little contributions of fifty cents and
a dollar from underpaid parsons. One of the most touching
instances of this sort was told me at Hudson, Ohio, about
the founding of Western Reserve College in 1826. One
farmer said he would be responsible for hauling all the stone
for the foundation from quarries ten miles away; it took his
boy one trip almost every weekday in the winter months to
haul that stone with yoke of oxen and “stone-boat.” The
wife of another farmer promised $50 a year for ten years,
from the proceeds of her butter and eggs. In those days the
prevailing wage for common labor was thirty-seven and a
half cents, eggs sold at four cents a dozen, and butter at six
and a quarter cents a pound. So it took about a thousand
dozen eggs and one hundred and sixty pounds of butter to
make a single annual contribution; but the farmer’s wife—
and the farmer’s cows and chickens—made good. A com-
munity that puts devotion like that into a college will never
let it down, as long as the college does its duty.
Nevertheless, local enthusiasm has certain disadvantages.
In the Middle West it has often resulted in five or six small,
struggling, inadequately financed colleges being established
where one university would have served the community far
better. The first illustration of excessive localism is in the
early history of Yale. For twenty years this poor little college