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Michigan State Agricultural College BY PRESIDENT ABBOT
A bill for the establishment of the college was introduced into the house and into the senate. When the house bill came to its third reading, various amendments as to location were made and rejected, and the bill was rejected 31 to 39 (Feb. 7). The senate bill, however, fixing upon the vicinity of Lansing as the location of the college, passed (Feb. 9) the senate by a vote of 24 to 5, and the next day passed the house by the large vote of 52 to 13. This bill is known as Act 130, approved Feb. 12, 1855.
Governor Bingham was a warm friend of the measure, and of the college. He took a prominent part in the exercises at the opening of the college (June 16, 1857), and a few months before his death, Oct., 1861, he sent to the college library as a token of his good will, a set of the works of John Adams, in ten volumes.
But to no one man is the college so much indebted as to Mr. John Clough Holmes, the first secretary of the State Agricultural Society. Into the project of establishment of a school of agriculture and horticulture he entered with singular zeal and devotion. He collected information from all quarters, and there were no features of the organic law which he had not discussed with those who were best qualified to give advice, and none of them that do not show his shaping hand. He was frequently at Lansing, conferring with State officers and legislators on the subject, and spent nearly the whole legislative winter of 1855 in Lansing, in diffusing a knowledge of the plan and awakening an interest in it, and this was done at his own private expense. Mr. Holmes gave the college his personal assistance as professor of horticulture during the years 1857, 1859, and 1861. Mr. Holmes is still. 1883, a not infrequent and always welcome visitor at the college, and one of its warmest friends.
Michigan State
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