University History
Adolescence
The ebbing fortunes of the college were dramatically revived when the flamboyant, charismatic Colonel William S. Clark became M.A.C.'s third president in 1868. Born in nearby Ashfield, the German-educated Clark did everything in his power to put the new college on the map. Under his enthusiastic leadership, four buildings rose up among the old apple orchards, hedgerows, and untended fields. Guided by his slogan – "Do it!" – Colonel Clark quickly became the acknowledged hero of the ninety-six young men at the college. Anxious to establish the reputation of his "bucolics" among the older colleges, he encouraged the students to establish a rowing club. In 1871, the "College Navy" entered a regatta held at Holyoke's Ingleside Hotel on the Connecticut River. Competing against Brown and Harvard, the Aggies, "with magnificent ease," came in two minutes ahead of the second-place team.
President Clark tried publicizing the college in other dramatic ways. One of the most notorious was his "giant squash experiment." He had a large squash placed in a metal harness that was intended to measure the expansive force of its growth. The pressure exerted by the harnessed squash was apparently sufficient to counterbalance a long beam on which Clark had suspended nearly two and a half tons of anvils, bricks, and iron weights. One can imagine the impression this made on the local farmers, already suspicious of the value of "academic agriculture."
Colonel Clark's enthusiasm for scientific agriculture even took him to Japan. In 1876-77, he took a leave of absence in order to help establish the Imperial College of Agriculture (now Hokkaido University) in Sapporo. The fruitful relationship between Hokkaido and UMass endures to the present day. Visiting students from Hokkaido still wish to see Clark's grave in Amherst. Japanese trees and shrubs descended from the seedlings which Clark brought back with him are still flourishing all over the campus.
In these early, precarious years of M.A.C., the ambitions of the visionary Clark were tempered by the practicality and gentle humanity of the college's first professor of agriculture, Levi Stockbridge. A self-educated farmer from Hadley, Stockbridge had a genius for experimental research. His work on crop fertilization stressed the nutritional needs of specific crops rather than general soil fertilization. With the help of his former pupil, William Bowker, he successfully marketed the "Stockbridge Manures," investing nearly all the profits in the college. As M.A.C. president in 1882, he obtained funding from the legislature for an agricultural experiment station to be established on campus. Working together with the college's brilliant new German professor of chemistry, Charles Goessman, Stockbridge was the person who, more than anyone else, convinced the region's farmers and the state legislature that the new agricultural college had something significant to offer.
Credits
The content of this Web page was adapted from a series of displays created for the 1988 celebration of the 125th anniversary of the founding of the University of Massachusetts. They were produced by the then Office of Humanities Programs in the Division of Continuing Education of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and were funded by a grant from the University President’s Office. Project Director: Kerry W. Buckley; Researcher: Robert J Wilson, III.
