BYU-Idaho: From Frontier Academy to Flood Relief to University
Idaho
Rexburg sits in a broad volcanic valley on the upper Snake River plain, and the school at its center has been reinventing itself for nearly one hundred forty years.
On November twelfth, eighteen eighty-eight, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints leaders organized the Bannock Stake Academy in Rexburg to provide education to a scattered population of LDS settlers. The first principal, Jacob Spori, started with fifty-nine students ranging from age five to twenty. Over the following decades the institution changed names repeatedly, first becoming the Fremont Stake Academy, then Ricks Academy, named for Thomas E. Ricks, one of the founding colonizers of the region, and eventually Ricks College in nineteen twenty-three.
For much of the twentieth century Ricks was a two-year junior college, enrolling a few thousand students and occupying a respected but regional place in LDS educational life. Then on June fifth, nineteen seventy-six, the Teton Dam failed upstream and eighty billion gallons of water rushed down the valley. Communities including Sugar City and parts of Rexburg were inundated in walls of water ten to thirty feet high. Eleven people died and tens of thousands lost nearly everything they owned. Ricks College became a disaster relief center, serving over three hundred eighty-six thousand meals to survivors in the weeks that followed.
The flood reshaped the town and deepened the college's bond with the surrounding community. Twenty-four years later came another transformation. On June twenty-first, two thousand, church president Gordon B. Hinckley announced that Ricks College would become a four-year university. The announcement was stunning. Ricks had just been named the best two-year college in the United States by U.S. News and World Report, and many alumni mourned the change. By two thousand one the institution had become Brigham Young University-Idaho.
Enrollment has since grown from roughly eight thousand students to over thirty thousand, making it one of the largest LDS universities in the world and the educational and economic anchor of eastern Idaho.
