By George Edmonston Jr., and Tom Bennett

The influence of "southern" politics on the birth of Corvallis College

It is a beautiful spring day in April 1892. A tired, young professor, employed at State Agricultural College in Corvallis, sits at the president’s desk in a building that would one day be called Benton Hall. He is writing a letter, a most revealing letter to his friend and mentor, Gen. Scott Shipp, superintendent of the prestigious Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia.

His name is John D. Letcher. At 39 years old, he has been at SAC four years. Since the death of the college’s president, Benjamin Lee Arnold, on January 30, 1892, he has been working two jobs, one as interim president, the other in his regular faculty appointment as teacher of mathematics, engineering and military tactics.

Thinking he might want to be the real president, he had applied for the job a few weeks earlier. Thirty others had done the same. When the college’s Board of Regents cuts the number to four, Letcher is among the finalists.

A sickness has taken over his normally cheery disposition, a kind of depression that imprisons the likable personality and energetic nature that had helped him become one of SAC’s most popular teachers. Yet his letter to Gen. Shipp isn’t about his health; it’s about how the job search is going, how he is afraid he will not be president for reasons that have little to do with academics or his standing in the university community. There’s something else, he feels.

Arnold had prompted Letcher’s decision to move to Oregon in 1889. A fellow Virginian and Civil War veteran, Ben Arnold had turned to higher education after the war and had landed his appointment at Oregon’s young agricultural school after its first president, William A. Finley, had resigned in 1872. It is not known to what extent the two men were friends before Letcher’s hiring. What is known is that to Arnold, an alumnus of the 38th Virginia Regiment, a soldier who claims to have been there when Bobby Lee turned his sword over to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Letcher would have been a Civil War celebrity.

The reason is simple and somewhat astonishing, given the physical and cultural distances that separate Lexington and Corvallis.

John D.’s father, the senior John Letcher, had been Confederate governor of Virginia during the war. His memory typically "southern," Arnold was certainly familiar with stories of how the young John D., at age 11, had had to flee the family home in Lexington just as it was being torched by troops of the 23rd Ohio Infantry. The raiders also burned the VMI campus, then harassed Letcher’s family in an attempt to capture the governor’s young son as a hostage. At the last second, the boy was hidden by his private school teacher, the "Misses Baxter," in her home.

Back in Corvallis, 40 years later, it didn’t take long for the two Virginians to became fast friends. Talk around campus was that Arnold was grooming Letcher to be the next president. When word of Arnold’s death reached the Regents, they immediately turned to the popular professor to ask if he would serve in an interim capacity until a new president could be appointed.

His answer was, of course; his relationship with Arnold would not have allowed him to think otherwise. In hindsight, it is questionable if he should ever have accepted the appointment; the new work load over the next several months would push him to the point of a mental breakdown, a factor that contributed to some extent in the decision the Regents made to look off-campus for Arnold’s replacement. The Regents, however, believed that with Letcher’s temporary appointment, they had filled the gap nicely, had chosen an administrator who could keep things together during this moment of crisis. Even though he was a relative newcomer on the faculty, Board members knew Letcher to be very conscientious and to possess a wealth of native abilities, describing him as "better acquainted with the duties of the president and the workings of the college than any man living."

They were particularly impressed with Letcher’s strong academic and professional background. He had graduated as an honor student in engineering at VMI in 1873 and had gone on to several teaching assignments and construction jobs in the field before landing the position of chief of engineering for the Ohio and Northwestern Railroad.

Also, in the world of federal land-grand colleges, of which SAC was one, his military background earned at VMI made him a valuable commodity at a school with a federal mandate to provide military instruction.

Letcher wipes his forehead, stares back down at his writing, then pens to Gen. Shipp that despite his excellent qualifications and good teaching record, he has misgivings about the outcome of the Regents’ search. He is candid with his friend on this, ending his letter in this most revealing way:

"Our Board will meet on April 20th. Their committee on applications met last week and selected three or four of the most prominent candidates...myself amongst the number. So far as I can learn, the real opposition to me is because I am a Southern Democrat, but do not mention this."

His words have a touch of "prophesy" about them, as we now know that Letcher was passed over in favor of John McKnight Bloss, a veteran of the Union army during the war, and a man with a Civil War story just as famous as that of his interim president predecessor.

Bloss, it turns out, is generally given credit, along with Barton W. Mitchell, for finding what historians today refer to as "Lee’s Lost Order 191," generally considered the greatest military blunder of the Civil War.

Order 191 contained the locations of the various parts of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia before the Battle of Antietam in September 1862. Order 191 was found several days (Sept. 13) before the battle was fought (Sept. 17) and given almost immediately by the two soldiers to army superiors all the way up the line. George McClellan, commanding the army, failed to act quickly on the amazing discovery, thus canceling any strategic advantage he may have enjoyed at the outset. Antietam, as we know, ended in stalemate.

Bloss, OSU’s third president, will be discussed in considerable detail later in this series.

Southern Democrats

What connection could there have been between Letcher’s personal politics--as unlikely as it seems in the far and remote Pacific Northwest-- and his application to the SAC presidency?

There’s plenty.

Often unknown, even to native Oregonians, is that much of western Oregon below Portland in the last 40 years of the 19th century was dominated by southern politics. Of course, everyone knows about The Oregon Trail and those who traveled it are immortalized in the many books and museums and family collections that mark this important period in the colonization of the west. It is much less recognized that a majority of those who traveled the Trail to settle in the Willamette Valley had their origins in the South, and they brought with them the life-styles, world views, political opinions and prejudices they had grown up with back home. The prevailing accents on the streets of pioneer Corvallis ranged anywhere from the soft sounds of the deep South to the nasal twangs of the border states.

And if you were to ask them, they would probably have told you they were from Missouri. It now appears that many actually lived there only temporarily, for financial or other reasons. Large numbers were actually from Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Iowa, or Illinois---states along the border between North and South.

Even though many of these people had no real southern roots at all, everyone shared an agricultural life-style and an individualistic bent inclined more toward the Democratic Party than the Whigs or their successors, the Republicans, who mostly lived "up north" in Portland and Oregon City.

Southern Methodists

One peaceable import into the Willamette Valley from a thriving southern populace in central California was the Southern Methodists.

The Southern Methodist denomination had resulted from a schism inside the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1844 over the issue of slavery. The Methodist Episcopal or M.E. Church had come to America from England during colonial days and had declared itself against slavery, in writing, as early as 1780.

In 1844 consensus began to break down. The incident that lit the fuse was the marriage of a certain Bishop Andrews in the state of Kentucky to a widow who owned slaves. The General Council of the church had an immediate reaction. The marriage was fine but the slaves had to go. Andrews disagreed. A year later, in Louisville, the controversial man-of-the-cloth helped lead a conference of the 13 slave-holding states to form a new Methodist denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, or "Southern Methodism."

The M.E. Church, South, to be sure, came with the southern and border-state families that migrated westward to California and Oregon. Southern Methodist activities in the 1850s centered at Vacaville, Calif., where Pacific Methodist College was soon established, offering both religious and liberal arts degrees. From its classrooms and teachers would come President William A. Finley, but we are jumping ahead of our story.

Soon the group had established churches in other parts of California and began looking north to Oregon for further expansion. With Benton County’s growing reputation as a place with pro-South leanings, Corvallis seemed an easy choice as a place to start a church. Maybe even a school.

Enter the Rev. Oricinth Fisher of the M.E. Church, South. Arriving in town in 1858, his assignment was to make Corvallis his base of operation for the establishment of Southern Methodist congregations throughout the Willamette Valley.

Branching out as instructed, he was successful in Rickreall, McFarland, Monroe, Eugene and, of course, Corvallis. The next year, as we saw in Part 2 of this series, Fisher became the recipient of a stroke of luck that enabled his church to establish an educational toehold in the area, the operation of a small pioneer academy, Corvallis College, that would one day become an internationally renowned land-grant university.

The Morrill Act of 1862

In the early years (1861-65), Corvallis College was not a true "college" by today’s standards, as no higher-level courses were offered in any subject. In 1862, a Civil War event occurred that would plant the seeds for the future of the new school as a full-fledged institution of higher learning, although it would take a few years for the event to be realized.

In July of '62, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Morrill Act, which offered federal support to higher education through "land grants" to all states in the union meeting certain requirements.

Although it was largely designed to promote the teaching of scientific agriculture and technical subjects, the provision that assured the bill’s passage through Congress was its emphasis on military training. The Union army found itself sadly lacking in trained officers as the war began and even more so as casualties from early battles left commanding generals scrambling fast to find qualified replacements. While Southern states had a long tradition of military academies to fall back on, the only academy in the North was at West Point in New York, many of whose alumni had defected to the South at the beginning of hostilities.

And so the Morrill Act required a land-grant college to teach military courses that would provide a reserve of trained officers throughout the country to supplement those from the academy. This was the germ of a program that would eventually become the R.O.T.C. program after World War I.

Like every other place in the country, Oregon knew about the Morrill Act as soon as it was passed. But other pressing political matters became a distraction. Though state leaders notified Congress right away of their intention to take advantage of the new legislation, it was a full six years before any action was taken. Oregon had only achieved statehood three years earlier and so, in fairness to the state’s political leaders, the "pressing" political matters that occupied their time had more to do with the business of getting a new state up-and-running than it had to do with any lack of interest on their part in higher education.

This delay, in hindsight, was a blessing to Corvallis College, simply because in 1862 the school could never have hoped to qualify as the state’s land-grant college. Despite its success in primary and preparatory instruction, it was hopelessly inadequate and underfunded to offer subjects more advanced. Had the Oregon legislature acted on the Morrill Act promptly, the nod may very well have gone to Willamette University, just across the street from the capitol in Salem and already well established in the region. The long delay allowed Corvallis College a chance to develop considerably before the issue came up again.

Left: President and Mrs. Finley. Above: Corvallis College's original building. The wing at right and the tower were added shortly after B.L. Arnold took office. Photos from the Orange and Black, 1938.

The arrival of William A. Finley

By 1864, the community’s support of the new school encouraged the trustees to expand it to a full-fledged liberal arts college. Turning to the denomination’s leadership in Vacaville for guidance, the solution came in the form of a recent graduate of Pacific Methodist named William A. Finley, A.M., D.D., 31 years of age, single, living in Santa Rosa, Calif.

The Rev. H. R. Avery and the Rev. W. M. Culp had both served in the top job at the college before Finley, but to Finley goes the distinction of being the first president of what would one day become Oregon State University, the educator to whom the M.E. Church, South gave first responsibility for converting Corvallis College into a real college of "higher learning."

Finley was appointed president in the early summer of 1865, with two new faculty assistants to help him: the Rev. B. F. Burch from Independence (Ore.), and R. N. Armstrong as professor of mathematics. Finley taught all the languages and for both jobs he was paid the princely (for those days) sum of $1,200.

Next week, we will look in some detail at the life of William Finley and his wife Sarah Elizabeth Latimer Finley.

Tom Bennett is a free-lance writer living in St. Louis, Missouri. In the 1990s, his writings on the history of OSU appeared frequently in The Oregon Stater. George Edmonston Jr. is editor of the Stater.