of the
campus, and to the presence of 412 would-be pupils, many of whom
expected to "work their way through." The brilliance of the faculty and
especially of its non-resident members (including J. R. Lowell, Louis
Agassiz, G. W. Curtis, Bayard Taylor, Theodore D. Dwight, and Goldwin
Smith, who was a resident professor in 1866-1869), was to a degree
over-shadowed during the fifteen years 1868-1882 by financial
difficulties. But Ezra Cornell himself paid many salaries during early
years, and provided much valuable equipment solely at his own expense;
and because the state's land scrip was selling too low to secure an
adequate endowment for the University, in 1866 he bought the land scrip
yet unsold (819,920 acres)[3] by the state at the rate of sixty cents
an acre on the understanding that all profits, in excess of the purchase
money, should constitute a separate endowment fund to which the
restrictions in the Morrill Act should not apply; and in 1866-1867 he
"located" 512,000 acres in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Kansas. In November
1874 he transferred these lands, which had cost him $576,953 more than
he had received from them, to the university. This actual deficit on the
lands owned by the university steadily increased up to 1881, when, after
the trustees had refused (in 1880) an offer of $1,250,000 for 275,000
acres of pine lands, they sold about 140,600 acres for $2,319,296;
ultimately 401,296 acres of the land turned over to the university by
Cornell were sold, bringing a net return of about $4,800,000. The
university was put on a sound financial footing; the number of students,
less in 1881-1882 than in 1868 at the opening of the university, again
increased, so that it was 585 in 1884-1885, and 2120 in 1897-1898. The
presidents of the university have been: Andrew Dickson White, 1865-1885;
Charles Kendall Adams, 1885-1892; and Jacob Gould Schurman.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Ezra Cornell (1807-1874) was born in Westchester county, New
York, on the 11th of January 1807. His parents were Quakers from
Massachusetts. He received a scanty education; worked as a carpenter
in Syracuse and as a machinist in Ithaca; became interested (about
1842) in the development of the electric telegraph; and after
unsuccessful or over-expensive attempts to ground the telegraph wires
in 1844 solved the difficulty by stringing them on poles. He
organized many telegraph construction companies, was one of the
found