The
mess hall
Someone once said that history doesn’t unfold, it piles up. A big part of my education during my first year as chancellor has been to sort through this “pile” to learn more about the history of the A&M System and the position of chancellor. It’s important that I find out all I can about the legacy I’ve been asked to carry forward.
The fascinating Centennial History of Texas A&M University, 1876-1976, by now-retired Texas A&M history professor Henry C. Dethloff, offers some interesting stories about A&M and about life in general in the not too distant past.
Most of all, this history lesson confirms that while some things in life change over time, other things never do. Here area few of Professor Dethloff's interesting tidbits.
Hardaway
Hunt Dinwiddie
In too many ways to count, we are fortunate to be alive in the 21st century. Many of the early presidents of Texas A&M were put into place not because their predecessors retired or moved on to other things, but because they succumbed to disease while in office.
Hardaway Hunt Dinwiddie, Lawrence Sullivan Ross and Lafayette Lumpkin Foster have in common that they were exceptional leaders (with exceptionally melodious names) among the first presidents of Texas A&M who died far too young. Dinwiddie, among other things, introduced the first real engineering courses in the mid-1880s, fully a decade after the college opened its doors, thus giving credibility to the “M” in Texas A&M. We’ll never know what his true potential could have been, though, because he died at the age of 43 after about three and half years in office.
Similarly, the great Lawrence Sullivan Ross, a legendary Texas Ranger and former governor of Texas, died suddenly of pneumonia in January 1898 a few days after “a cold, wet, hunting trip on the Navasota bottoms,” and Foster “was well on his way to establishing himself as one of the most competent and progressive” A&M presidents when he succumbed to the same illness a few years later. In addition, frequent outbreaks of measles, smallpox and dysentery too often resulted in the deaths of students and faculty.
Texas
A&M got its first "modern" toilet facilities in the 1880s.
Lafayette
Lumpkin Foster
The likelihood of a long retirement is not the only thing we take for granted. Today’s admissions officers have a lot to contend with, but packs of wolves attacking prospective students are rarely among them.
Dethloff tells of “one young boy who had come to enroll in the institution [and] was attacked by wolves during the day in full sight of the main building.” Another student slipped and fell as he left the dining hall one evening, “whereon a pack of hungry wolves jumped on him.”
Lawrence
Sullivan Ross
The second young man was rescued, but Dethloff doesn’t mention the fate of the first. I suspect he decided to enroll elsewhere. Even if the wolf attack didn’t deter him, the primitive facilities probably would have.
Money was tight following the Civil War, and Texas A&M’s fate in one of the state’s poorest and most isolated counties was by no means secure. The University of Texas existed, on paper at least, before Texas A&M, even though Texas A&M was the state’s first public institution of higher learning when it opened in 1876.
A
housing shortage meant that many students had to live in tents.
Whether the state needed two public universities was hotly debated for years. Not only did some members of the Legislature think Texas A&M should become part of “The University,” in the 1880s there was considerable support for converting the campus into a “lunatic asylum.”
For its first 25 years or so, Texas A&M had no modern sewage system and drinking water came from cisterns. Students had to borrow bath tubs from the faculty. Overcrowding meant that many students had to live in tents, and those lucky enough to have a solid roof over their heads still relied on wood stoves for heat.
This made life especially miserable during the winter of 1898, when the temperature in College Station hovered at –4 degrees and Galveston Bay froze solid, making it possible to drive a team of horses and wagon over the ice from Galveston to Point Bolivar. According to Dethloff, Texas A&M’s 350 or so students burned 3,000 cords of wood that winter.
Some things change, but others stay the same even across centuries. Politics, both the kind acted out in any office on any given day and the kind acted out by our elected officials, have played a major role in the history of the A&M System.
As is true in most organizations, the personalities involved shaped events. Texas A&M and the A&M System did not develop in a linear fashion. There were plenty of setbacks along the way.
For example, the contributions of three out of Texas A&M’s first five presidents were overshadowed by politicking that resulted in their forced departures from office.
Thomas
Sanford Gathright
Thomas Sanford Gathright, the college’s first president, let an internal dispute between faculty members grow into a statewide scandal that led to his downfall.
In June 1879, a faculty committee met to review recommendations for certain cadets to be promoted to officer positions. This typically was a rubber-stamp deal, but for reasons that were completely unrelated, the faculty committee voted 4-5 not to promote John C. Crisp to senior captain of Company A, the highest position in the Corps of Cadets. The vote clearly reflected discord among the committee members rather than Crisp’s qualifications.
The result over the following months was a mass exodus of students and faculty, and even involvement by the governor. After an investigation, the Board of Directors—now the Board of Regents—asked for the resignation of Gathright and the entire remaining faculty in late November. Gathright died about six months later, bitter to the end. Crisp never graduated from Texas A&M but went on to a successful career as editor and manager of the Uvalde Publishing Company.
The action against James Reid Cole, the third president, was a little more covert. As acting president, he weathered many storms, including a financial scandal, a drop in enrollment and declining public support for the new college.
Only about a month after being named to the permanent position, however, the Board of Directors, in a surprise move, abolished the position of president and established instead the position of chairman of the faculty, to be elected by the faculty. Four days later, Dethloff tells us, the faculty elected Hardaway Hunt Dinwiddie to the position, effectively removing Cole from power.
Even success couldn’t guarantee continued service. Louis Lowry McInnis, the fifth president, was by all accounts an extraordinary leader who had been groomed for the job by the Board of Directors. But when Lawrence Sullivan Ross became available for the job after serving as governor, the Board abruptly dismissed McInnis.
The politics that took place in Austin also shaped Texas A&M’s early years. After decades of inadequate resources, for example, the Legislature in 1903 provided $300,000 over two years to the college, prompting criticism that Texas A&M had grown too powerful and was “running the state.” Dethloff writes that one legislator even facetiously introduced a bill to appropriate all money “now or hereafter in the treasury not otherwise appropriated” to Texas A&M.
Given the tremendous heroism and achievements of A&M System graduates over the decades, it’s tempting to view the past through a filter of nostalgia that makes us forget that these graduates were once young students who, like those before and since, occasionally engaged in mischief.
Texas
A&M's fate in one of the state's poorest and most isolated counties was
by no means secure.
This was especially true at Texas A&M in the early years, when College Station was nothing more than a train stop on the prairie, and students had to get permission to travel the five miles north to Bryan, a Wild West town that averaged two saloons per block and was known for “public drunkenness, open gambling and incidental gun play.”
Dethloff writes that “There were keg-rollings, when students would haul a keg of beer in from Bryan and hide it away in the woods for a secret, and prohibited, beer bust. In the late 1880s and ‘90s a cane rush, actually a free-for-all brawl, became a popular pastime. . . . Students delighted in wrecking outhouses, hiding liquor in their rooms for an occasional nip, and swiping poultry from the back yards of professors’ homes.”
It is reassuring to remember that many of these students went on to become outstanding professionals and civic leaders, dedicated to their communities and families, just as today’s students will someday.
As a frequent commencement speaker, I know how difficult it can be to give a motivational and informative talk—I long ago gave up on trying to be memorable—on a day when most people in the audience are simply counting the minutes until they get their diplomas.
I can only imagine how the audience in the un-airconditioned auditorium in College Station reacted in the spring of 1904 when they found out the Rev. Sam R. Hay would be discussing the subject of “Life.”
That’s a lot to cover in 12 minutes. It turns out he talked about how the “world was crowded with ‘unprepared people,’” and advised graduates to “utilize their opportunities for education to the fullest.”
Not bad advice. I hope the reverend also told them to pay attention to history. You can learn a lot from the way it piles up.
