Autumn alk dean blair3/8/2024 Andrew’s College in Fort Smith (Sebastian County), but the effort failed. ![]() In the late 1840s, Arkansas’s Catholic bishop, Andrew Byrne, attempted to found an Irish colony and St. Just prior to the school’s planned opening, a fire destroyed the only building, and the project had to be abandoned. Unfortunately, the depression of 1838 had reached Arkansas, leading to a shortage of funds. Although the legislature passed a charter for the intended school, Democrats in the region voted against it, and religious and even educational prejudices were manifest. Missionary and educator Cephas Washburn was the guiding light. The most ambitious project was the Far West Seminary, to be located outside of Fayetteville (Washington County). While seminary fund monies disappeared in the legislature, private initiative tried to step in. Thereafter, governors occasionally harped about higher education, but perhaps typical was the observation of John Selden Roane who wondered where college students would come from when Arkansas still lacked common schools. Davies, a banker and planter from Chicot County, called for creating a “University of Arkansas.” Opponents ridiculed the idea of education and proceeded to pass a tax cut instead. In what has been called “The Swindle of the Century,” not only the land itself but also the proceeds from what was sold disappeared, never even to be properly accounted for.Īs soon as Arkansas became a state, Whig legislator Anthony H. On March 2, 1827, Congress set aside from public sale two townships per state or territory (seventy-two square miles, or more than 46,000 acres) “for the use and support of a university…and for no other use or purpose whatsoever.” Originally, the grant was in the hands of the governor, but in response to pleas from legislators, Congress turned control over to them and in subsequent legislation removed the restrictions on how the land was to be treated. The most educated early official was the second territorial governor, George Izard, whose education career began in France at the College of Navarre and included attendance at Columbia University in New York City and the College of Philadelphia. ![]() The first territorial delegate, James Woodson Bates, had attended Yale and graduated from Princeton. James Miller, the first territorial governor, had attended Williams College in Massachusetts, as had Chester Ashley, the leader of the state bar association and also a graduate of the Litchfield Law School in Connecticut. The transfer of Louisiana from France to the United States resulted in the arrival in Arkansas of numerous persons with backgrounds in higher education. In Arkansas, higher education appeared, at least in name, prior to the Civil War, but the state university and most of the private institutions were postwar products.ĭuring Arkansas’s colonial period (1686–1802), there is no evidence of any public interest in higher education and little interest in even the most elementary sort. Formal education above the high school level came to be known as higher education in the twentieth century.
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