history of the RI AES

In this document:

How did the Station come to be?

Why is URI a land grant institution

A few glimpses back

Coming of Age

The Environmental Era

New Paradigms

Facing Tomorrow

Why is URI a land grant institution, and why is it in Kingston?

The Agricultural School in Kingston, later to become the University of Rhode Island, actually came about only because of the Hatch Act.

In Rhode Island, the original land grant was given to Brown University in 1863. However, when Brown failed to produce the required agricultural curriculum and graduates, angry and politically influential farmers wanted to wrest the land grant away. The excuse they needed was the Hatch Act, which required only that funds would be given to a designated agricultural school in each state. That is why the State funded a new Agricultural School in 1888, to create an alternative to giving the Hatch money to Brown!

On May 19, 1892, the Rhode Island legislature renamed the School the Rhode Island College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. At the same time, the state's land grant was transferred to the new College. The College, of course, grew to become the University of Rhode Island.

So why is URI a land grant institution and why is it in Kingston? Because of the Agricultural Experiment Station, of course!

So What's an Agricultural Experiment Station, Anyway?
By Pat Logan, Director

There is an Agricultural Experiment Station in each state, in the District of Columbia, and in US territories (Puerto Rice, Guam, American Samoa, Northern Marianas, and the Virgin Islands). All of the Stations are associated with Land Grant College or Universities. The Land Grants were created by the Morrill Act of July 2, 1862. This Act provided federal funds to each state to endow at least one college "…to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes…." When passed during the Civil War, the government was understandably short of actual funds, but the young country owned plenty of real land. In some states, federal lands were turned over to the state to construct the new Colleges. Rhode Island, without substantial federal properties, was given 120,000 acres in the Kansas territory, which the State surveyed and sold to create actual funds.

The Stations were created when Congress passed the Hatch Act (March 2, 1887), granting each state $15,000 annually to establish Agricultural Experiment Stations at each of the Land Grant institutions. The Rhode Island Station’s birth date is probably best taken as March 21, 1888, when the legislature appropriated $5000 to establish a state Agricultural School and gave it authority to receive the Hatch funds.

In those days, a dollar went a long way. When Kingston residents Jeremiah Peckham, Jr., and Bernon Helme raised $4000 from the South Kingstown Council and local residents, the State needed only another $1000 to purchase 140 acres from Kingston farmer Oliver Watson-Tefft, "land partially on a hill and rolling into the plain below." This became the home of the School. (The original farm house stands on campus today.)

The School opened its doors to 26 students (24 of them male) on September 24, 1890. Tuition was free and rooms (without furniture or bedding) were $2 per term! Students could work in the Station’s laboratory or carpentry shop, or at the many jobs available at a campus under construction, for 10-cents an hour. Hauling tons of huge bolders and building the first hardtop roads were viewed as "practical exercise" for students.

The School had five faculty, including principal John H. Washburn, who lectured on chemistry, mathematics, and dairying. (Washburn was the best paid of the faculty, earning $1500 per year.) Professor Charles O. Flagg taught Geology, Lorenzo F. Kinney expounded on horticulture and botany, and Homer J. Wheeler also taught Chemistry. Samuel Cushman lectured on Beekeeping, and later on Poultry. Flagg was the Station Director, and he, Washburn, Kinney, and Wheeler supervised research, which in turn served as a way to educate the students. Cushman later joined the Station as Apiculturalist and Poultry Manager.

A Few Glimpses Back

The early days of the Station must have been extraordinarily busy for the faculty and their students. From the beginning, the Station published lengthy Bulletins on its work. By the end of 1890, in addition to two descriptions of the Station and the Farm, Bulletins included the following topics:

Milk Fever in Cows Animal Feeds
Bee Keeping
Potatoes
Experiments in Apiculture Fruit Varieties
Soils and Fertilizers

Many of today’s academic and research programs at URI can be traced to the early days of the College and the Station. Today’s horticulture and turfgrass programs were among the first begun at the Station, as the new School built a greenhouse and prepared research plots on the flat fields of the plain.

Today’s aquaculture program finds its roots in the early poultry programs. Among the early successes of this program were Samuel Cushman’s contributions to improve a breed of red chicken that was being developed by Little Compton farmer Phillip Wilbour (the largest poultry producer in the Nation in the 1890’s, according to one report). Crosses of local chickens with a big red chicken, obtained from a New Bedford sailor returning from Malay, eventually lead to the named breed "Rhode Island Red," which is now the State bird and the ancestor of many of the Nation’s current flock. Cushman also helped to identify the cause of a common fatal disease of juvenile Turkeys, called blackhead. This discovery soon led to changes in production techniques that made it possible for farmers to grow the abundant supply of domestic birds that now adorn our Thanksgiving tables.

The close ties between the poultry research of the Station and the needs of the School prompted the College to offer its first summer-school "special course," in poultry husbandry. The rigorous 4-week offering ran for 12 hours a day, beginning at 6 a.m., and included some 50 topics, including zoology, anatomy, physiology, plus practical instruction in carpentry, food chemistry, caponizing, and breeding, among other essentials. This new approach to practical summertime education was the first of its kind in the country. The poultry course later expanded into a four-year curriculum, but without much need to enlarge the list of topics covered.

At the turn of the Century, student interest in the mechanic arts (engineering) clearly began to surpass interest in agriculture. Also, faculty interests broadened, and agricultural sciences began to focus as much on science as on practical day-to-day problem solving for farmers. Of six degree programs offered in 1902, only one was associated with agriculture.

In 1904, President Kenyon Butterfield, not wanting to neglect farmer needs, argued strongly that Station scientists needed to do more work with farmers directly. He appointed Andrew Stene as Director of Extension Services, making this a permanent part of the College’s efforts to serve the community. Station scientists gave over 3 dozen talks to nearly 1000 farmers that year.

In 1914, the Smith-Lever Agricultural Extension Act formally established a national Cooperative Extension Service, providing funds to each land grant institution for this purpose. In a hint of later trends, Smith-Lever funding was based on a formula (numbers of people involved in agriculture in each state), and it required each state to match the federal funds with state funds. With the passage of the Smith-Lever Act, the tri-part mission of the land grant institutions (teaching, research, extension) was firmly established as a national system.


Coming of Age

In 1909 the College was renamed Rhode Island State College. More of the students were women (25% of graduates by 1914) and the curriculum was considerably diversified. As the economy slowed in the 1920’s, and then dipped into the Great Depression, agricultural studies began to diversify, expanding beyond a strict focus on production, to include new interests in agricultural economics. Extension began to focus on rural social and economic problems as much on plant cultivation and animal husbandry.

In 1928, the College purchased the East Farm, a mile south of Kingston. Here, the Station’s work on poultry and horticulture was allowed to expand into new houses and laboratories and to nearly 100 acres of orchards and ornamental plantings.

During World War II, College enrollment dropped to 363 students in 1944. Station contributions to the war efforts included development of dehydrated fruits and vegetables and work on insecticides. Once again, the College grew, with the purchase of the Peckham and Shermans' farms in 1944 and 1945, which added 527 acres to the campus. When the war ended, enrollments rebounded, and the College struggled to accommodate nearly 3200 students in 1946.

In the 1950’s, the State College became the University of Rhode Island (1951), and forestry, agricultural engineering, and new branches of agricultural science and business management grew out of plant and animal science roots. Major Station research emphases included work on blueberries, potatoes, turfgrasses for golf courses and recreation, and nutrition (plant, animal, and human). The poultry program continued to make national contributions in disease research, including work leading to the use of the drug sulfaquinoxaline to prevent coccidiosis, a major killer of chickens. President Carl Woodward noted that industry savings from this contribution alone had an economic value that exceeded the entire cost of running the Station for the previous 40 years.

The Environmental Era

In 1958, America was shocked by the launch of the first earth satellite, the Soviet Union’s Sputnik. At nearly the same time, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring and Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, which raised the Nation’s awareness of our environment and of the finite nature of our planet. These events helped spur unprecedented growth in federal investment in science and engineering research, with a parallel growth in funding in the Nation’s Research Universities.

In 1958, URI’s Board of Trustees authorized the University’s first Doctoral programs. In 1961, the Graduate School of Oceanography was created from the Narragansett Marine laboratory. Both of these events signaled the emergence of URI as one of the Nation’s major research universities. In part because it was now able to take advantage of federal research funds, the University experienced a decade of exponential growth. URI doubled its faculty in 10 years, and enrollments more than doubled. Faculty were most successful in capturing new research funds in the marine and environmental sciences.

New Paradigms

In December 1970 the US Environmental Protection Agency was formed. Nationally, agriculture began to reconsider the blessings of the "Golden Age of Pesticides," which had begun in WWII when DDT was introduced to control malaria-carrying mosquitoes. The Rhode Island Station began to look for ways to reduce dependency on pesticides to control insect and disease pests. Price shocks and disruptions in global oil supplies in 1973 and 1979 also gave rise to new concerns about energy. Station research began to consider more efficient ways to grow crops, ways that depended less on irrigation and fertilizer, or that required less mechanical and human labor.

Out of concern for agriculture’s dependency on pesticides, and mindful of emerging negative environmental effects, Station scientists began to seek alternatives to pesticides in the 1970’s. Entomologists and plant pathologists worked with ornamental and grass plant breeders to promote a shift in commercial nursery and turfgrass markets toward insect or disease resistant varieties. This involved identification of these varieties through Station research and collaborations with plant scientists throughout the Northeast. Grasses were also selected for greater tolerance to wear, for increased nitrogen efficiency (needing less fertilizer), and for greater drought tolerance (less need for watering).

A strong commitment to Integrated Pest Management (IPM) marked the efforts of the entomology program throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s. IPM attempts to reduce dependency on pesticides and energy (i.e., fertilizers and water) through changes in cultural practice, varietal improvement, or biological control. Station scientists led national efforts to develop an IPM program for the Colorado potato beetle, trying a wide variety of approaches. They explored new faster-growing and fuzzy-leafed cultivars, evaluated feeding-suppressive fungicides, and timed pesticide sprays by computer modeling. Station entomologists led an international effort to find natural biological control agents of the potato beetle in central Mexico.

To facilitate the later, the Station built its own insect rearing and quarantine facility in 1996, one that the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) now uses as a standard for insect containment facilities nationwide. With the facility, the Station’s biological control program, under the direction of Drs. Richard Casagrande and Roger LeBrun, has been able to directly collect European and Chinese natural enemies of the hemlock woolly adelgid and the lily leaf beetle, serious introduced pests. The biocontrol lab has also advanced extension efforts to reduce two noxious weeds, the invasive purple loose-strife, and the salt-marsh habitat-destroying reed, Phragmites australis.

One sign of the impact of these programs on the Rhode Island Nursery Industry is the emergence of the formal gardens (corner of Upper College Road and Alumni Avenue). In 1994, URI faculty were joined by members of the Rhode Island Nursery Association in a still ongoing collaboration to renovate the gardens surrounding the Cooperative Extension Center and the Plant Science Greenhouses. Hundreds of ornamental plants, selected from the list of low-input varieties (i.e., resistant to pests, drought tolerant, etc.) were donated by the industry, along with days of labor to properly layout the garden and to plant all materials. The garden today is a spiritually-renewing center for visitors and campus staff, one which practices what it preaches by being a living landscape of sustainable plants for the New England garden.

Increasing fuel prices in the 1970’s and 80’s influenced many responses across America. One sign of the rising cost of fuel was the decline of northern poultry farms, which literally went south in search of lower production costs. As poultry virtually disappeared from New England, and as declining catches revealed the limits of Atlantic coastal fisheries, the animal science department began to explore the potentials of aquaculture as a partial replacement for both. The Ocean State presented an opportunity to help fledgling industries — based on both terrestrial aquaculture and on mariculture — use the salty waters of local estuaries, the Narragansett Bay, or near-shore ocean bottom to rear shellfish and penned fish. The Station converted a large chicken house at the East Farm to an aquacultural research facility in the late 1970’s, for the study of salmon physiology and culture. Nearby, another aquaculture facility was dedicated to histology for the diagnosis of fish and shellfish diseases.

Facing Tomorrow

While proud of its past strengths and contributions, the Station is continuing to look for ways to address emerging new needs in agriculture and the environment. The future in part will be built upon existing scientific and technical strengths of the Station. Presently, these include integrated pest management and biological control, ornamental horticulture and turf grass management, plant pathology, entomology, agronomy, and hydrology, complemented by economic studies of the methods used to evaluate, manage and preserve coastal ecosystems.

Two emerging areas of research are being explored by the Station as it ponders the new millennium. Aquacultural research at RIAES is dealing with the many forms of disease that affect the state and nation's important fin fish and shellfish industries. If aquaculture is to become a major growth industry for the Ocean State, myriad scientific, technical, and regulatory questions that must be solved before we can harness Narragansett Bay as an economically and environmentally sound home for fish and shellfish culture.

Biotechnology is another emerging focus area of the Station. The environmental sciences are being transformed by biotechnology, and 50 URI marine and environmental science faculty members have responded with an Environmental Biotechnology Initiative.

The Station has played a significant historical role in providing practical science to meet the agricultural and environmental needs of the State and region. No other institution, public or private, is as well positioned as the Station to bring the sophistication of University resources to bear on Rhode Island's environmental and agricultural issues.