A memorial to Dr. Joseph Denison, first president of the
Kansas State Agricultural College and to the pioneers whose
dauntless courage and tireless energy made possible our homes and
comforts of to-day. Riley County Historical Society, 1932.
In 1855, Denison was convinced by his brother-in-law, Isaac
Goodnow, that he should move to Kansas Territory to help establish
a new town for the New England Emigrant Aid Company. On March 13,
1855, Denison joined a party of Company members leaving Boston, and
made his way to Kansas Territory, which was soon to boil over with
violence. (See Bleeding Kansas.) Over the next several years
Denison was part of a small group that settled and built the
abolitionist town of Manhattan, Kansas, at the union of the Kansas
River and the Big Blue River in the Flint Hills. By 1857 Denison
and Goodnow, along with others, hatched a plan to create a
Methodist college in Manhattan. In April 1857, at a meeting of the
Methodist Church Conference, a plan for the college was properly
inaugurated. The following year, on February 9, 1858, Manhattan's
"Blue Mont Central College" was incorporated by act of the Kansas
Territorial Legislature and Territorial Governor James Denver. By
1860, a large building was erected and the school was open and
operating, with Denison as President. However, the institution was
already struggling financially.
When Kansas was admitted to the United States in 1861, one of
the first things the new state Legislature planned to do was to
establish a state University. After two years of political
wrangling, on February 16, 1863, the state accepted Manhattan's
offer to donate the Blue Mont College building and grounds, and
established the state's Land-grant university at the site –
the institution that would become Kansas State University. At the
first meeting of the state Board of Regents on July 23, 1863,
Denison was hired as the first President of Kansas State
Agricultural College. He served in this position for ten years.
During his term, Denison managed a number of important
accomplishments, including establishing a faculty and acquiring
valuable land that would later become the center of the university.
Under his direction, the school attracted Benjamin Franklin Mudge
as Chair of the geology department; Mudge led his Kansas State
students on fossil-collecting expeditions to Western Kansas as part
of the Bone Wars. Despite Denison's accomplishments, the state
asked for his resignation in 1873. After leaving Kansas State,
Denison was hired as President of Baker University, a Methodist
school in Baldwin City, Kansas. He held this position from 1874 to
1879, before retiring to work with the Methodist church in the town
he helped settle, Manhattan. He died on February 19, 1900, in
Manhattan, which had by then grown into a thriving college town of
3,500.
Congrats to Legolaws for the FTF!!