Cornell College Mt. Vernon, IA
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Cornell College Is Oldest Within Linn Co.; Founded 1852
To
the vision of the Rev. Geo. B. Bowman, a Methodist circuit rider and a
North Carolinian by birth, Cornell college owes its beginning. The
Reverend Bowman was a visionary and while lacking in the finer points of
education himself, he seemed to feel that his great mission in life was
the founding of an institution of higher learning in this infant
state. He started a college at Iowa City while preaching there, but it
failed with less than a year of life. In the spring of 1851, Bowman and
the Rev. Dr. A. J. Kynett, the pastor of the Methodist church at Mount
Vernon planned the founding of a Christian college at that place.
With
his characteristic impatience to be under way. Bowman did not wait to
obtain the deed to the land before holding a fourth of July ground
breaking ceremony in 1852, with State Superintendent of Education James
Harlan delivering the first fourth of July oration in the district to a
group of farmers and townspeople assembled there. Construction work was
begun on the first building immediately and the deeds to the land were obtained shortly after.
Growth
was rapid and in 1857 the school became Cornell college, named for W.
W. and J. B. Cornell of New York who had donated to the school. The
Rev. R. W. Keeler was the first head and his two year term was marked
by a rigidity of moral standards that carried over for several years
into the presidency of his successor, the Reverend Fellows. One of the
first rules set down by the faculty under the Reverend Keeler
prohibited the gentlemen of the student body from speaking to their
feminine colleagues without faculty permission.
President
Fellows served the school for ten years. On his death he was succeeded
by Dr. William Fletcher King who served as president of the institution
for forty-five years.
The development of Cornell has not been
marked with any outstanding calamities or sudden smiles of dame
fortune, but has been the steady growth in material and educational
prosperity enjoyed since the year of its inception. The first forty
years of the college saw no donation of more that $25,000, but in more
recent years the school has a total endowment of in excess of
$3,000.000.
From the two brick buildings erected in the first
decade of the school's history the campus has grown to include some of
the finest college buildings in Iowa. In addition to the fine chapel,
science hall, literary, dormitories, etc., the present plans include
the early completion of a fine arts building and the proposed
construction of a field house on the campus.
Present head of the school is Dr. H. J. Burgstahler.
Photo & Data Source: Linn County Centennial Edition, The Marion Sentinel, Aug 26, 1937 |
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