Land-Grant Universities -- The View from Maine by Michael Banerjee. CSHE 4.26

Looking beyond the famous Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862 reveals that there were many more land grants—over 4 million acres' worth—from public authorities, creating many more land-grant universities than previously thought. Among the original land-grant universities are those calling themselves “private” today, like Harvard, Dartmouth, and Columbia, and public universities that do not identify themselves as land-grant universities, like the Universities of Michigan, North Carolina, and Oregon. Fully grasping the extent of the very long land-grant movement requires that we look east, where the movement began centuries before the Morrill Act. Focusing on Bowdoin College and Colby College, this article shows that these two colleges in Maine received more than 234,000 acres before the Morrill Act, more than the University of Maine received under that Act, making Maine home to not one, but three land-grant universities. The article also points out that universities first exercised the power of eminent domain around the turn of the twentieth century, a development that historians had previously overlooked.