in which they set themselves to
their task.

Of the nineteen members of the Board at that time eleven were present at
this first session, which lasted three days. Included among the number,
as ex-officio members, were the boy Governor of the State, Stevens T.
Mason, then only twenty-five years old, the Lieutenant-Governor, Edward
Mundy, and the Chancellor of the State, Elon Farnsworth; while among the
members by appointment were Michigan's first Congressman and author of
the law under which the University was to be organized, General Isaac E.
Crary, and two well-known Detroit physicians, Dr. Zina Pitcher,
afterward to be known as the founder of the Medical School, and Dr.
Samuel Denton, destined to be a professor in the same Department.

Their first action was the appointment of a committee to select the
forty acres offered as an inducement to bring the University to Ann
Arbor. Measures were then taken for the organization of the institution;
the Legislature was petitioned to give the Board the power to appoint a
Chancellor; four professorships were established until more were needed;
salaries were limited to not less than $1,200 or more than $2,000; and a
Librarian was appointed for a library not yet in existence.

Thus the University began its career. The men who were responsible for
it in its early years were, for the most part, lawyers and politicians,
lacking even the actual experience in educational matters which the
clergymen of that time were supposed to have; but there is evidence of
an idealism and confidence in the future on their part which must
explain the eventual success of the University,--a vision which enabled
it to become the model for all succeeding state institutions.

The task before this Board and its immediate successors was not an easy
one. They saw, in their mind's eye, a university with thousands of
students, forming the cap-stone of a great educational system which was
to rest on the little log schoolhouses which were so rapidly rising in
the wilderness about them. Their immediate resources, however, proved
almost ridiculously inadequate, while their best efforts were often
nullified by the selfishness and lack of foresight of many of their
contemporaries. Land set aside for the University by the Government was
sold for a song to satisfy speculators. An elaborate building program
had, perforce, to be abandoned and even the simple buildings erected
were criticized as extravagant. The Facult