University of Nevada, Reno

Nevada achieved statehood prematurely in that year, because of the politics of the Civil War era. Abraham Lincoln felt he needed the votes of another state loyal to the Union in the later phases of the conflict. Nevada's state university was also born prematurely, before the frontier society was ready for higher education. The history of the University of Nevada in Reno has been greatly influenced by those facts.

The authors of the Nevada Constitution wrote their sections on higher learning under the influence of the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, which offered some acreage to every state for the support of colleges offering instruction in agriculture and the mechanical arts. Because Nevada was so thinly populated and its resources so meager, it was not able to offer college-level instruction until more than twenty years later. While the legislature of 1873 authorized the opening of a "university" in Elko (a fledgling railroad town only four years old), it provided money for only one professor; only seven students appeared when it opened its doors in 1874. Designated as a "university preparatory school" by the founding Board of Regents, it struggled for a decade to serve a maximum of thirty students before the legislature voted to close it in 1885.

(from http://www.unr.edu/content/)

Associated With

• 1457: The Barbarians