Rev. George B. Bowman

Cornell owes its inception to a Methodist circuit rider, the Rev. George B. Bowman, a North Carolinian by birth, who came to Iowa from Missouri in 1841, three years after the territorial organization of the commonwealth. This heroic pioneer, resourceful, far seeing, and sanguine of the future, eminent in initiative and in the power of compelling others to his plans, was one of those rare men to whom the task of building states is entrusted. He was not himself a college man, but with him education was a passion. To found institutions of higher education he considered his special mission. Hardly had he been appointed as pastor of the church at Iowa City in 1841 when he undertook the building of a church school, called Iowa City College. In 1845 Rev. James Harlan, a local preacher of Indians, was chosen president, and with one assistant opened the school in 1846. The next year Mr. Harlan was elected state superintendent of public instruction, and the college was closed never to be re-opened. It had at least served to bring to the state one of its most distinguished citizens, afterward to be honored with the United States senatorship and the secretaryship of the interior. Meanwhile Mr. Bowman had been appointed presiding elder of the Dubuque district, which then included much of east-central Iowa. The failure of the premature attempt at Iowa City had not discouraged him; he awaited the favorable opportunity he still looked for - suitable local conditions for a Christian college in the state. It is a long-told legend, even if it be nothing more than legend, that when Elder Bowman came riding on horseback to the Linn Grove circuit, he stopped on the crest of a lonely hill on which Mount Vernon now stands. From its commanding summit vistas of virgin prairie and primeval forest stretched for ten and twenty miles away. Here there fell upon him, the circuit preacher, the trance and vision of the prophet. He saw the far-off future; he heard the tramp of the multitudes to come. Dismounting, he kneeled down in the rank prairie grass and in prayer to Almighty God consecrated this hill for all time to the cause of Christian education. And it is a matter of authentic history that in the spring of 1851 Elder Bowman and Rev. Dr. A. J. Kynett, in the parsonage at Mount Vernon, planned together for the early founding and upbuilding of a Christian college on this site. (1911 History, p. 201)