College in 1864 and 1865. Failing health caused him to move to Benton county, Iowa, in 1866, where he served as principal of the Iowa College for the Blind from 1869 to 1875, when he opened a large fine stock farm at Vinton and became editor of the Western Farm Journal published at Cedar Rapids. From 1879 until 1886 he was professor of agriculture in the Iowa State College, while during the years 1883 and 1884 he served as president of the college. For three years, from 1873 until 1876, he was president of the Iowa Fine Stock Breeder's Association.
Dr. Knapp left Iowa in 1886 to assume the supervision of a tract of land in southwestern Louisiana, as large as the state of Connecticut. He introduced to the rice field of the southwest, the wheat machinery of the northwest. By his great work for rice he became president of the Rice Growers Association of America, which position he held until his removal to Washington three years ago.
In 1898, at the request of the secretary of agriculture, he visited the Philippines, Japan and China to report on their agricultural resources. In 1900 he went to Porto Rico on a similar mission. In 1901 and 1902 he went to Ceylon and India and again to China and Japan, bringing from the latter a seed rice of great value, which is used today in the southwest. During this last trip he performed private missions for the secretary of war in the Philippines and for President Roosevelt in Honolulu.
The crowning work of his life was begun when the secretary of agriculture sent him to Texas in 1903 to fight the Mexican boll weevil. By his efforts he turned what seemed the utter destruction of the cotton crop of the south into a blessing and opened the way for the establishment of the "Farmer's Cooperative Demonstration Work of the South" of which he was the originator and the inspiration during the last seven years of his life.
At seventy-seven years of age he had an office force of thirty men, five hundred field agents, seventy-five thousand adult and forty-six thousand boy demonstrators, all under the Farmer's Cooperative Demonstration Work of the United States department of agriculture, the general education board of New York and the patrons of southern states. By his work the south has been able to grow two blades of grass, two bales of cotton, and two bushels of corn where one grew before. His work was to reach the humblest of southern homes and help them to see the light. Himself the product of the classical school, he became the apostle of and gave his life to the exemplification of modern industrial education.
Dr. Knapp married Maria Hotchkiss, of Washington county, New York, in 1856, and left five children to mourn his loss. They are : Mrs. Maria Knapp Mayo, the wife of A. M. Mayo, of Lake Charles, Louisiana; Herman Knapp, treasurer and registrar of Iowa State College, Ames, Iowa; Bradford Knapp, connected with the farmer's demonstration work of the south, of Washington, D. C.; Seaman Arthur Knapp, cashier of Calcasieu National Bank, Lake Charles, Louisiana; and Mrs. Helen Knapp Fay, the wife of Dr. Oliver J. Fay, of Des Moines, Iowa.