By Tom Bennett and George Edmonston Jr.

Alice Biddle, from Corvallis, was actually one of three students in Oregon State's first graduating class in 1870. The other two were men with the last names of Currin and Veach, but Alice is the one we most remember. Perfect grades. Perfect attendance. OSU's first woman graduate. To top it off, a bachelor of science degree in the liberal arts. And she was only 16.

But she was mature way beyond her years and is remembered as one of the most energetic and enthusiastic young ladies to have enrolled at Corvallis College in the early period. She was very active socially and was a talented musician. Above all, she was brilliant.

She came from one of Corvallis' most prominent families. Her parents, Benjamin Robert and Maria Biddle, were early settlers to Benton County and lived at first on a pioneer claim of 320 acres on land located in what is now OSU's McDonald Forest. Alice was born there in 1854 in a log cabin.

Her enterprising father, known as "B.R." to his friends, bought property in Dixon's Addition in nearby Corvallis and resold it as commercial and residential lots. He later built the Biddle family home on four lots between 6th and 7th Streets on Harrison Ave. The home is still one of the finest in Corvallis and can be seen at its original location. (The house is privately owned and not open to the public but can be easily seen from Harrison.)

Jennifer Girllo, great-great-great granddaughter of Alice Biddle. Jennifer graduated from OSU this spring. Photo by Denny Wolverton.

"B.R." was a personal friend to Corvallis College president William Finley and was an early and frequent donor to the cause of the young school. He served on the college's Board of Trustees from 1869 to 1875 and helped solicit private donations to purchase the "college farm" mandated by the Morrill Act of 1862. The college farm site later was the location of Benton Hall, the "Pathway," and other historic campus landmarks.

As transplants from the South - her father from Virginia, her mother a Tennessee native - Alice's parents fit well into the culture of Corvallis, influenced as the town was by the many settlers who had come over the Oregon Trail from states bordering the Deep South and who were potentially in sympathy with the cause of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

The Biddle family members, however, seemed different. For one thing, they were members of the Union Party, not exactly the kind of politics that would play well in, say, Richmond or Atlanta. For another, and this is one of those connections that makes the historian's heart flutter, they were personal friends of Abraham Lincoln. As a young lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, the future president was their next door neighbor! Not for a few months, but 12 years.

And yet, her family wasn't Alice's only link to Corvallis or OSU history. A few months after graduating, she married one of the town's most eligible bachelors, professor William Moreland, age 25.

Moreland, as we have seen in previous chapters of this series, played a pivotal role in helping shape the early history of agriculture at OSU, in addition to being the clerk in the legislature in 1868 who discovered that the state was about ready to forfeit its opportunity to be awarded a land-grant school under the provisions of the Morrill Act. If he hadn't acted quickly, the deadline would have passed and the chance to get federal funding for an agricultural college would have been lost.

Furthermore, Alice's future husband was able to use his clerk's position to advantage in the political struggle that followed, in which Southern Democrats from Benton and Linn counties managed to outmaneuver a group from Salem pushing for Willamette University to be the state's new agriculture school. According to legend, after finding the document, Moreland fixed things so that when it came time to write on the document the name of the winning school, the words "Willamette University" were erased at the last second and replaced by the words "Corvallis College." Whether true or not, it's a great story.

After their marriage, Alice and William moved in with B.R. and Maria. It was fortunate they did. When the couple's first child was born--a daughter named Esther--Alice proved to be a problem mother.

Still a teenager and accustomed to being the coddled princess of the family, Alice was disappointed with the child's red hair, eventually leaving her to be carried for by Maria.

Soon after, the Morelands left Corvallis. William's short stint clerking for the legislature had given him the bug for politics and the law, and he began to study for the bar on the side. In 1872, he was admitted to the state bar and started private practice in Oregon City. In 1874, a better opportunity popped up in Sonoma County, Calif., and so off the Morelands went, where William opened small law firm in the town of Healdsburg. They were later joined by the Biddles, who lived out the rest of their lives there.

Not much else is known about Alice in later years, this remarkable first alumna of OSU. What little there is mostly appears in a history of the Biddle family written many years later by Esther Moreland Leithold, Alice's little red-headed daughter of long ago!