FOOD, FORESTRY, WATER
CSU historians Linda Meyer and Gordon Hazard discuss how the Colorado Agricultural College influenced the early days of the Centennial State.
By Christopher Outcalt | Photography from CSU Libraries, Archives & Special Collections | May 4, 2026
THE COLORADO AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE, which would evolve into Colorado State University, was the very first public school of higher education established in what was then the Territory of Colorado. That was Feb. 11, 1870, making CSU 156 years old this year. There’s another notable anniversary in our neck of the woods in 2026: The state of Colorado turns 150. With this timing, Colorado’s early years were inevitably shaped by the college built on the outskirts of the frontier town of Fort Collins. After all, the Colorado Agricultural College became official six years before Colorado became the 38th state in the Union.
Additionally, the college’s mission – like that of all land-grant universities – was to democratize higher education so that advanced learning was accessible for the children of working-class families, just as it was for the moneyed elite. From the beginning, the college’s graduates represented its biggest impact on the state. At that time – the start of the Second Industrial Revolution – the school’s teaching, research, and outreach focused largely on agricultural innovations that would help drive economic development and quality of life. So, it’s not surprising that the Colorado Agricultural College quickly and significantly shaped food production and water management in the state – critical influences that CSU continues today.
To help mark Colorado’s 150th birthday, STATE magazine spoke with two prominent CSU historians about how the Colorado Agricultural College influenced the state during its early years. CSU alumna Linda Meyer is an archivist for the Agricultural and Natural Resources Archive with CSU Libraries and has worked at the university for nearly 25 years. University history expert Gordon “Hap” Hazard also graduated from CSU and later served as president of the Fort Collins Historical Society.
Here, we present the conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.
What was Colorado like in those early days, as CSU was getting started, and what role did the school play as Colorado was getting its footing as a state?
Meyer: That’s a good question. We could go in all kinds of different directions with that. One thing I would say is that the late CSU historian Jim Hansen quoted Colorado economist and philosopher Kenneth Boulding, who observed that it was not until agriculture had improved so that man no longer had to devote all his time to survival that organized knowledge was possible. He talks about the importance of agriculture being kind of the foundation for this, and the Agricultural College was essential to the development of agriculture in those early days of the state.
Hazard: In the early 1860s, the U.S. Army built Camp Collins, which later became the city of Fort Collins. They decided they needed to have an outpost here to protect settlers traveling on the Overland Trail. Early agriculturalists supplied hay to the troops for their horses. When the fort was decommissioned in 1867, people who were growing crops needed to find another outlet for those crops – that’s one reason there was a big push to have the Agricultural College established.
There were also miners here. In the 1850s, people followed the miners West because miners needed to eat. People could make money providing them with eggs and plants and food of different kinds. That’s how the state started to grow: supporting the mining and supporting the Army and supporting other people.
Samuel Johnson, college President Charles A. Lory, Margaret Durward, and Miriam Palmer on a field excursion in 1913. Palmer would become an accomplished entomology illustrator and researcher.
It sounds like the college was very connected to the state right from the beginning.
Meyer: Fort Collins was named the location of the Colorado Agricultural College in 1870, but classes were not held until 1879. The Agricultural Experiment Station was the original research arm of the college and extended research efforts and findings beyond campus. Extension wasn’t created until 1914, but in those early years we did have the Experiment Station. It was started in 1887 by the Hatch Act, and in the early days they had what were called Farmers’ Institutes to teach people what they had learned from their experiments about how to grow crops in the state. Sometimes they would have those here on campus, but sometimes they would travel to the Western Slope or elsewhere across the state.
Hazard: The Experiment Station got into outreach right away. That was always the State Board of Agriculture’s mandate to the college president. From day one, it was: If you learn something here, you get that information out. The Experiment Station was their way of getting different information around the state. Eastern Colorado is different from Fort Collins and is different from the mountains and the Western Slope. Learning how to grow different kinds of things in those places and then getting that information out – that’s where Extension eventually came in. But in those early days, the Experiment Station was the arm of the university that provided a way of continuing to keep that information flow going out to the people in different regions of the state. It continues to work that way today.
The Colorado Agricultural College built its Cow Barn in 1887, during the school’s Pioneer Era.
That’s such an essential part of that original land-grant mission of service to the state through teaching, research, and outreach.
Meyer: The biggest function of the Agricultural College at the time was really to develop agriculture in this state and find ways to overcome problems. Find ways to be the most productive in growing across the state. That was a major focus of the course of study.
And that’s still a big focus today, all these years later.
Hazard: Everybody’s got to eat. Many of the people who came out to Fort Collins had been active farmers in other parts of the country. Probably the one thing that they learned the hard way was this was a different environment compared with most of the rest of Colorado, particularly in the Eastern Plains and southern desert. They had to learn how to get water to places to grow something and learn what will grow in these drier-type conditions with irrigation. So, you had your agriculture. And then you had your civil engineering – and a lot of that was irrigation engineering. That was developed right here. Elwood Mead was the first professor of irrigation engineering in the U.S. during his time at CSU, in the 1880s. Lake Mead is named after him based on his contributions to the construction of Hoover Dam and his important public service roles related to water management and irrigation in the West.
Forestry students learn surveying and related skills on campus.
What was his story at CSU?
Hazard: Mead studied engineering at Purdue and started here as a mathematics instructor in 1883. Then he convinced the State Board of Agriculture, the college governing board, to start some of the very first studies of irrigation efficiency. He created a two-term course in irrigation engineering for students in their senior year. One was on the pressure and flow of water, and the other focused on surveys and construction of canals and reservoirs. The Statistics Building on the corner of the Oval – that was first the Civil and Irrigation Engineering Building.
He actually helped get the first hydraulic engineering complex built at the college, which is where the Lory Student Center is today. There’s a plaque on the side of the student center that commemorates where that was. So, yes, water teaching and research were very important at the college from the start.
How did the things happening in the early days at CSU influence the state and vice versa?
Hazard: Well, from day one, the governing board for CSU was the State Board of Agriculture. We became the state of Colorado in 1876; we were still the Territory of Colorado before that. One of the assignments of the State Board of Agriculture, besides overseeing agriculture in the state, was being the governing body of the Agricultural College. In the early 2000s, they became the Board of Governors. We’re more urbanized now; the word agriculture is no longer part of our name.
The board was made up of people from different geographic locales. And the idea was – just like the Experiment Station – to have people located in different parts of the state because the different locations were just dramatically different in their needs. They also wanted to be able to get that information out and conduct studies that would benefit all the people of Colorado – down in the San Luis Valley or out on the Western Slope with the orchards or out on the Eastern Plains.
The board members knew agriculture. They knew the value of land. They knew the value of water with the land. You get the sense of this if you go look at the minutes of the State Board from those early years. That’s something I spent quite a bit of time doing when I was here as a volunteer on campus at the archive.
Left: A student milks a dairy cow on the college farm in 1921. Right: Dairy cattle in the college herd, shown in 1921.
Top: A student milks a dairy cow on the college farm in 1921. Bottom: Dairy cattle in the college herd, shown in 1921.
What stood out to you when you were going through those early transcripts?
Hazard: They talked about water. They talked about what crops they should be experimenting with. One of the mandates was, “Let’s not be studying stuff we already know how to grow; let’s be looking for things that we don’t know how to grow and see if we can grow them.” They had some good hits – and also some misses.
Were there any notable hits or misses from that early time?
Hazard: There’s one story I always love to tell from the late 1880s. One of the things they thought about as a product that people really liked was cigars. They wanted to know: Could we grow tobacco in Colorado? And not have to ship it from the East Coast, from Virgina. Well, they planted different varieties of tobacco right here on this campus. Grew it. And they built a little drying shed to dry it. They had to cure the tobacco. They took these different leaves they had grown and dried them. We had a cigar maker here in town. They rolled the dried leaves into cigars and then lit them up – and they were horrible.
Students examine chickens in a poultry judging class.
What an experiment!
Hazard: Nobody would have wanted to buy them. And this was also kind of going against the grain of the college because they didn’t allow smoking or the use of tobacco on campus. There were a lot of cigarettes and tobacco smoked out on the railroad. The railroad, by the way, didn’t come through Fort Collins until 1877.
That was one of the very first things that the State Board of Agriculture did when they elected their first president – was to go and get a $100 payment from the railroad to cover the perpetual right of way across the college grounds. So, today, when people hear the trains in town and they think, “Man, we gotta get rid of that,” that ain’t going to happen.
Yeah, I’m sure back in those days it would have been very desirable to have the railroad.
Hazard: They were anxious to get it because it connected us with Denver and Cheyenne. Cheyenne was where the transcontinental railroad came through. So, the railroad gave us a connection to that. That moved Fort Collins from just an isolated little farming community into a place where they can now take their crops and put them on a train and move back and forth. Bring stuff in. The railroad was the lifeblood of what made Fort Collins and the college early on.
Elwood Mead, namesake of Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, taught the nation’s first courses in irrigation engineering at Colorado Agricultural College starting in 1884.
I imagine that really helped connect the Agricultural College with the rest of the state.
Meyer: We have some early letters to the director of the Experiment Station from researchers in far-flung areas around the state. They had an agreement with the railroad that they would get a pass so they could travel back and forth from the university to wherever they were. It was a pretty important part of the early days of the college, having that transportation option. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, these Farmers’ Institutes – sometimes they would have them here on campus, but sometimes they would travel. When I think of these early professors and their horse-and-buggy days – they could take the train some places when it arrived. But other places they had to just hitch up the wagon and go to these little towns. It was a whole different world then extending the mission of the college.
Hazard: Right behind where Old Main stood there was the college depot, in the early 1890s. So, you could actually get on and off the train coming through campus without having to go down to Laporte to where the Colorado and Southern Depot was. Members of the State Board, when they would come in from Denver for meetings, they could get off at the depot and walk half a block into Old Main and have their meeting. They geared their meetings around what time the afternoon train back to Denver was going to be coming through. That was the way of getting in and out of Fort Collins.
It took a small army of students and faculty to establish farm fields and ditches on the grounds of the Colorado Agricultural College; this work was in 1912. The building in the background is Agricultural Hall.
Did they theorize as to why the tobacco was no good?
Meyer: I think the Colorado soil had something to do with it – had to do with the flavors and things like that. They were particular about what tasted good and what didn’t. Some grapes make a fine wine and others are used to make grape jelly. Grapes have made a comeback on the Western Slope. There are better growing conditions for grapes there than we have here on the eastern side. It’s the climate and soil. There are so many different factors, and that’s what the Experiment Station researchers were working with. You know, this is the soil we have in the area. What can we do? What grows well here? What do we need to choose to grow somewhere else?
Were there other crop wins or losses that come to mind from those days?
Hazard: A lot of it was, How do we get the most out of our irrigation water? That’s where the engineering expertise came in – being able to cut a ditch. Things like that. These ditches that we have today – Arthur Ditch that goes through the West Lawn of the campus. That was there before we were a college. People say, “Why do we have an irrigation ditch going through campus?” We don’t. We have a campus built around an irrigation ditch.
That was actually kind of the original land that was made for the college, some 240 acres. That was kind of the western border. They drew water off the ditch to do some very early botany projects. And some of that water was for growing crops. By 1905, they began buying land, a couple of farms that basically took the college and put it out to Shields. That was the experimental farm out there for a long time.
The railroad, connecting Colorado Agricultural College to Denver and Cheyenne, was an essential mode of transportation for students and others; a depot sat just west of the Main Building, which came to be known as Old Main.
You mentioned Elwood Mead. Are there other individuals who come to mind who were formative for the college and the state?
Meyer: I was just thinking about Dr. Clarence Gillette with the entomology department. There was a lot that needed to be learned about insects and their impact on agriculture. And we’ve been recently working with Miriam Palmer’s collections. Miriam was a young woman who came here to illustrate scientific publications for the Agricultural Experiment Station research bulletins. She was hired jointly in 1904 – working half time for horticulture and half time for entomology. The horticulturalists wanted her to draw pictures of apples and other kinds of fruit. She also worked for Dr. Gillette. He later became the Experiment Station director. She was a young woman, and the early days of entomology were all male. Yet she was instrumental in illustrating their publications. She became an expert in aphids, but her name isn’t that well known in scientific circles because she was mainly an illustrator. Now, of course, they have ways of reproducing these insects that don’t involve drawing freehand. But she looked through a microscope to draw them.
Wow. That’s really cool.
Meyer: And Dr. Gillette was instrumental in helping to identify insects that were harmful and how to deal with them. There were also studies here on campus with beekeeping. We had beehives in the Oval! There are pictures of that. It’s pretty cool to see.
Professor Clarence P. Gillette established the college entomology program with significant help from Miriam Palmer, an accomplished illustrator and expert in aphids.
What were other connection points between the college and state during their early days?
Hazard: On the site of today’s Clark Building stood a beautiful big barn. There was both a horse barn and a cow barn – dairy was pretty important. They had dairy classes on campus. Dr. George Glover, an alumnus who established our CSU veterinary program, was instrumental in teaching farmers that you’ve got to take care of the health of your cows – specifically cows with tuberculosis. If cows are infected with bovine tuberculosis, they can infect people with their milk – at least until pasteurization became widespread. Sanitation and dairy practices were where the veterinary school tied in quickly to commercial production and even human health.
Meyer: Dr. Glover was in the first class of graduates in 1884. He was one of three in the class. And, you know, a third of that first graduating class was female because Libbie Coy was one of the three graduates; she became a community leader in Fort Collins and an important advocate for education. In fact, she was the first female graduate from any college or university in the state. The third graduate was Lon Loomis, who became a prosperous farmer in the area.
Clockwise from top left: Beekeeping on the Oval, with the Civil and Irrigation Engineering Building in the background. / Students examine sheep and lambs on the college farm. / Students learn to groom Shorthorn cattle. / Equine care and management were key topics in the college’s early years, when horses were important to farm work and transportation.
Top to bottom: Beekeeping on the Oval, with the Civil and Irrigation Engineering Building in the background. / Students examine sheep and lambs on the college farm. / Equine care and management were key topics in the college’s early years, when horses were important to farm work and transportation. / Students learn to groom Shorthorn cattle.
You’ve talked about the influence of the Colorado Agricultural College on food production and water management in Colorado. What were other areas of emphasis in the college’s early years that were important in shaping the state?
Meyer: Forestry also became an important emphasis at the Agricultural College, starting with the first forestry course in 1904. Maintaining forest reserves in the mountains kept the snowpack melting at a slower rate, which slowed spring runoff and flooding on the Plains. In addition, planting windbreaks of various kinds of trees helped reduce wind erosion and maintain moisture in shaded soil. We have an archival collection of the Colorado State Forestry Association that preserves letters to an early association president related to these topics. The Mountain Campus, with its emphasis on forestry courses, became part of Colorado Agricultural College in 1914.
Other areas of emphasis at the college in the early 1900s were civil engineering, with a focus on irrigation; mechanical engineering, with a focus on farm equipment; electrical engineering; and veterinary medicine. There was also a professional-level domestic economy course introduced for women students in 1895, vigorously promoted by Eliza Routt and Theodosia Ammons, who were active in the women’s suffrage movement.
It’s interesting how the mission of the university in these early days was so similar to much of what we still accomplish at CSU today. To have a connection to all the different parts of the state. To try to do research here on campus that extends well beyond Fort Collins.
Meyer: The technology is different, but the mission is the same.
The first graduating class from Colorado Agricultural College included, from left, Leonides Loomis, Libbie Coy, and George Glover; they graduated in 1884, formed the Alumni Association, and reunited 50 years later.
Are there other things from the early days of the Agricultural College that you’ve found yourself surprised to learn over the years?
Meyer: You know, I really was surprised at first to learn how many women were involved in the early days. Because this was the land grant, this was the college for the people. And they developed the women’s course of study here pretty quickly. You can have some discussions about discrimination with that. The women had to do their women’s course, which was really our entrance into the liberal arts and a greatly expanded curriculum, and the men did all the ag courses and that kind of thing. But the fact that they made provisions for women so early on, I think was important.
When Miriam Palmer was first looking for employment, she assumed she was going to have to be a school teacher because that’s what women did. But her drawing ability gave her an opportunity to work here at the college. Miriam got her master’s degree in entomology after she came here, and she became a faculty member in the entomology department. But even though she was trained in entomology, they never let her teach a class. She was allowed to teach physiology because the women’s course required it. But the men in the entomology department felt that entomology was not a field for women. There was a woman with a Ph.D. in entomology who had trained in England, got her Ph.D., and came here in 1937. They wouldn’t let her teach entomology either, even though she had a Ph.D.
Students practiced military tactics on the Oval in 1916. Such training was part of the founding mission for land-grant universities.
If you had to make a list of the things the state should be thankful for from the college, what would you put on it?
Hazard: Three meals a day and snacks [laughs]. It really was the crops. For instance, that’s when they found out that apples do really well in Colorado.
Meyer: For that early time period, it was the knowledge produced for the benefit of students and people all over the state. There were bulletins being printed. The ag college was the go-to place if you wanted to learn about how to grow something or solve an agricultural problem that you had with the crops that you were trying to grow back in those days. The Agricultural Experiment Station correspondence, that was the way. They would get letters from people all over asking questions of the Experiment Station director.
Hazard: I remember seeing a letter come in from George Washington Carver, the scientist who worked on all the different uses of peanuts. He wanted our Experiment Station bulletins. There was just an understanding that people at the ag college were experimenting and then publishing the results of their experiments. These Experiment Station trade bulletins were mailed all over the U.S. They’d get letters from other Experiment Station directors asking for the newest bulletin from the ag college. It was standard practice back in the day. That was how you communicated: by letter with a copy of the latest bulletin. The fact that we had stations in places besides Fort Collins showed that we recognized there are different geographic areas that have different growing conditions and different needs. We had people on the ground who were doing experiments to gain knowledge and disseminate that knowledge to people in different areas.
The college veterinary program was formally established in 1907; horses, cattle, and other livestock were the main patients in the early years.
That sounds a lot like the foundation of what science is today in many ways. You do an experiment; you share the information and the results publicly; and you keep going.
Meyer: Yes. And, of course, the existing knowledge gets superseded by new knowledge. So, looking back on some of these early bulletins, we might say, “Oh, well, you know, that’s an interesting conclusion.” But that was the best they had with what they were working with at the time. There were things that didn’t work – like the tobacco experiment – and they moved on to other things that they found did work. That was kind of their role.
They were all very dedicated people. When I think about going in a horse and buggy to southeast Colorado for Farmers’ Institutes – and it wasn’t just in the summer. They did winter Farmers’ Institutes too. Sometimes they didn’t get home for a long time. We used to have some serious winters in this state. There would be blizzards, and they might get stuck for a while. But they were dedicated enough that they would travel to these far-flung reaches of the state to share what they had learned. People would come to the schoolhouse or the church building to listen to these professors who came from the ag college to share what they were learning. We certainly didn’t have the technology we have today for instantaneous transmission of information. And we certainly didn’t have the travel methods we have today. But they were dedicated enough back then that they would get out there and do it: They would take the information out to the people.
Photo at top: Assessing college beef cattle, 1922.
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