The First Freshmen

Editor’s note: This story, from国家统计局magazine，探讨了1889年进入北卡罗来纳州农业和机械艺术学院的第一名学生的生命。NC州杂志是NC.国家校友会成员国的好处。有关如何加入的信息，请访问www.alumni.ncsu.edu.。

他们必须至少14岁。他们必须提供良好的道德品质和身体发展的证据。他们不得不表现出阅读和写作英语的能力，以及熟悉简单的算术，地理和北卡罗来纳历史。

Such were the requirements that the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (A&M) set forth in 1889 for students to be accepted. Fifty-one young men from North Carolina showed up that October for the first weeks of class. During that first academic year, the class grew to 72, who each paid $20 in annual tuition, $8 a month for board, 75 cents a month for laundry services and $12.50 a year for books, stationery, fuel, lights and medical care.

第一节课的一些成员的儿子米erchants and farmers. Others were sons of Confederate soldiers. A few were first-generation Americans, born to immigrants from Germany and Scotland. Some, like Samuel Johnston Hinsdale, the 14-year old son of a Raleigh lawyer, were young teenagers whose matriculation would give them an education and an exodus out of adolescence. Others were already young men, like 23-year-old Clarence Bender Foy, who arrived after working on his father’s farm in Jones County.

In an iconic photo believed to be the first image of that first class of students, 40 of them and an instructor stand on the steps of what is now Holladay Hall. Their faces stare seriously at the camera. All are dressed like they’re on their way to an important business deal, some swallowed by suits too large for their teenage frames. A few sport heavy mustaches; others’ smooth babyfaces reflect their owners’ green youth. A number of the young men pose with the formal manner of a military officer, with a hand resting on their chests or their classmates’ shoulders, perhaps signaling a feeling of brotherhood that had already begun forming.

第一个课程，19名叫做苏醒县的家。其他人来自远西部的Buncombe County和远东作为安德洛县。Stephen Anthony Lacoste，来自S.C.的17岁，是北卡罗来纳州唯一的学生。尽管他们的起源变化，但他们愿意赌博赌博土地授予教育的仍然不断发展的商品，并在1862年通过Morrill法案的通过。他们占据了一个由66英亩，一栋建筑，一个外屋，一个良好的骡子组成的校园里的机会。

A popular saying often uttered by antagonists of the college was, “I wouldn’t be an agricultural man for he isn’t worth a damn,” writes David A. Lockmiller in his History of The North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Engineering of the University of North Carolina 1889–1939 . That echoed other sentiments thrown at A&M, like “Cow College.” That was, in large part, due to courses that were set up for students to study an agriculture or mechanics track, which they started pursuing their sophomore year. The school year was divided into fall, winter and spring terms. Agriculture students studied horticulture, arboriculture, botany, history, English and bookkeeping, and had to perform manual labor that served as a practical application of their discipline. By 1893, the curriculum grew to include more complex classes, like general geology and paleontology, road-making and horticultural construction, and commercial floriculture. The mechanics curriculum included math, chemistry, history, English and bookkeeping, but came to include the study of steam machinery, surveying and the study of bridges and roofs.

“我们将在上午9点上午9:00上课，通常会下午2:00或下午3:00。”沃尔特·杰罗姆马斯在1966年校友会归档面试中说。之后，“如果我们会得到任何农场工作，那么我们会得到一份工作并赚取一些钱。”Mathews说，男人可以让每小时25至50美分。或者他们可以在校园周围工作七分零的工作，就像每小时铃声敲响时间以保持时间。他们可以花时间在第一家图书馆中举办了由学院教职员工和朋友捐赠的1,500卷。或者他们可以加入校园内的雷尔伦或黛拉文学社团，并与年轻人的基督教协会一起参加每周会议。

在1893年在A＆M的第一堂课上毕业时，这是一个为期三天的事件。它发表了第19名年轻人的大学生活结束，这是第一个72的部分，其中大多数人没有完成大学。在6月9日的第一天，几位老年人在学院教堂送来了演讲。亨利·埃米尔博伊茨（Henry Emil Bonitz）被努力成为国家在国家练习架构的第一家北卡罗利人之一，发表了一个名为“曲柄和傻瓜”的演讲，其中他将曲柄与科学和起诉傻瓜一致，因为无用。Mathews告诉他的同学，他们应该渴望成为贵族，并开展上帝的工作。

三天后，6月12日，Rev. Henry W. Battle提供了一个学士学位地址。最后，6月14日，毕业仪式发生了。选择更多的老年人根据他们的学术身分阅读他们的论文。罗伯特威尔逊艾伦以20岁的学习力学达到了四年前四年。在他的开始时，他站在高级班总统，阅读他的论文“科学和品格”。Charles Duffy Francks是一名高级学生学习力学，阅读他的论文“上升动力”。亚历山大·霍洛拉霍尔总统读了荣誉卷。当他们的名字宣布他们的论文主题宣布，前辈然后收到了学位。[查看主题列表，p。24.]开始终止，在市中心的大都会大厅校园内享有亨利瓦特森，肯塔基州记者的校园，他在路易斯维尔创立了鲁西维尔，致力于美国的伟大和人民的道德地址。

After these men left A&M, they pursued diverse career paths. Some became bankers and headed to law school. Others worked as engineers and machinists. Some became esteemed researchers in varying fields of study. Some returned to farms and had large families. And one became a shoe salesman.

Charles Burgess Williams was the man of firsts in the first class. Born in Camden County, he came to A&M at the age of 17 to study agriculture and chemistry. He was captain of the college’s first football team and graduated first in the Class of 1893, with an average of 89.3. The college later hired him as its first chemistry instructor and the first head of the Department of Agronomy. In 1917, he became the first dean of agriculture, a position he held for seven years. In 1953, six years after his death from a heart attack, Williams Hall was dedicated in his honor. “NC State was his life, really,” says Margie Lucas ’82 ms , Williams’ granddaughter and the third in a five-generation Wolfpack family. “That was passed on to us by osmosis. NC State was very important to the whole family.”

威廉姆斯的遗产超越了他的母校的校园。他在农业领域的贡献在20世纪初为南部的领先科学家巩固了他的位置。他研究了土壤，肥料以及欧洲保护努力如何在美国众所周知的农业类型的专业中使用。“先生大豆，“威廉姆斯是大豆的主要十字军，认识到美国农民可能意味着金钱。他鼓励制造商使用大豆生产涂料和清漆。“在美国农业部的公告之后，在今年之前的大豆在大豆中，农业学家在这里叙述了州立大学农学院的农学院负责人C.B.威廉姆斯教授。可能已经做了更多的是带来的受欢迎程度豆类比任何其他人都要，“曾报道的新闻和观察员。

Another member of the first class who was celebrated for his research was Samuel Erson Asbury. He was one of the later students to enroll in that first class, coming to A&M in January 1890 from Burke County, N.C., looking like an angel-faced cherub. He excelled in agriculture and chemistry and was instrumental in leading the Leazar Society, which was predicated on the notion that engineers and scientists needed to be well-rounded through reading, debate and oration.

Asbury left North Carolina to take a job as a chemist at Texas A&M University in 1902 and flourished as a Renaissance man in College Station, Texas, until he retired in 1945. “Doc” Asbury became one of Texas A&M’s most celebrated professors, studying fertilizers and rose cultures. But he also loved poetry, music and Texas’ state history, even going so far as to compose a musical based on the Texas Revolution of 1836. When Asbury died in 1962 at the age of 89, he willed a collection of books on roses and one on Texas history to Texas A&M, along with a musical library containing five grand pianos and 700 classical records.

大部分的就职类职业North Carolina. Frank Theophilus Meacham spent time at the Biltmore Dairy in Asheville, N.C., working for the Vanderbilt family. William McNeill Lytch was principal owner and operator of the Laurinburg Machine Company, which repaired machinery, after an early career on the Florida railroads. Others, like Asbury, left the state. Edward Moore Gibbon became a city engineer in Jacksonville, Fla., and an engineer in Memphis, Tenn., where he died in 1952. Frank Fuller Floyd left for Knoxville, Tenn., where he worked for the Knoxville Sentinel for 11 years before breaking into the coal industry with Jellico Coal Mining Company in 1905. He eventually began his own company, Floyd & Montgomery Coal Company.

Some of the Class of 1893 never left Raleigh. Samuel Marvin Young owned and ran the S.M. Young Hardware Store on Martin Street for a number of years. He was the last surving graduate of the Class of 1893, dying in 1968. Louis Thompson Yarbrough, who had come to the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts as a boy of 16, worked as a state engineer in the North Carolina swamplands and the Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company before finally taking a job for the U.S. Postal Service, where he worked for 37 years. On campus, Yarbrough Drive shares his name as does Mary E. Yarbrough Courtyard, named for his daughter, who was one of the first female graduates from NC State and the first woman to receive a graduate degree from the university.

“We were some of the co-builders of this College movement,” Yarbrough wrote of himself and his classmates in a 1943 message in State College News . “We received much and gave much. The giving, to say the least, was our presence, for without students the movement could not have been started on the basic principles that resulted in its present success.”

Charles Wesley McIlwean was one of those with whom the movement began. He left his family’s farm in New Bern, N.C., to attend A&M. He didn’t graduate, but returned to that farm and expanded it to about 1,200 acres and even built a cotton gin. In 1906, he scraped his leg on a buggy he used for transportation and died of blood poisoning. But his grandson, Earl McIlwean ’58, continued his grandfather’s movement by coming to NC State. Earl, 77, often looks at that picture of his grandfather and his first classmates and wonders what they thought at the outset of the college.

“我已经看过这张照片很多次，我一直都有这个问题，”洛基山的退休城市工人，N.C，“我不会说这是恐惧或希望。我对那张照片的解释是他们看起来都很严肃，就像他们准备进入一些未知的冒险。

“It’s kind of like, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m ready to get started.’”

编者注：作者使用了这个故事中的许多来源，包括来自校友杂志的字母，报纸剪报，ob告，校友记录和过去的文章。1890年代的北卡罗来纳农业和机械师艺术课程目录也证明了一个宝贵的来源。两本书还提供了必要的历史和背景。他们是David A. Lockmiller北卡罗来纳州北卡罗来纳大学农业和工程学院的历史，1889-1939和Alice E. Regan的北卡罗来纳州立大学：一个叙事历史。