Idaho State University: Born from a Legislative Gamble

Idaho State University in Pocatello began as something much more modest: the Academy of Idaho, a secondary and technical school established in nineteen oh one at the insistence of a single determined state senator.

Theodore Turner, who would later become the mayor of Pocatello, shepherded Senate Bill Fifty-Three through the Idaho legislature in the spring of nineteen oh one. Governor Frank Hunt signed it on March eleventh. The bill came with a catch: the academy would only be built if local landowners donated the property. That set off a bitter real estate dispute within Pocatello. Various factions competed to have the campus placed near their own holdings, which would drive up land values in the surrounding blocks.

The fight was eventually settled. An eight-and-a-half-acre tract at what is now the lower campus was selected. Turner himself donated additional land, Red Hill and a one-hundred-sixty-acre farm, to make the project viable. The Academy of Idaho officially opened its doors on September twenty-second, nineteen oh two.

In nineteen fifteen, the institution was renamed the Idaho Technical Institute, reflecting its emphasis on vocational and industrial training suited to Idaho's agricultural and mining economy. It became Idaho State College in nineteen forty-seven, and Idaho State University in nineteen sixty-three, a name that more accurately reflected the doctoral programs and research mission it had developed over six decades.

Today the university enrolls roughly twelve thousand students and houses the only pharmacy school in the state of Idaho, along with a health professions program that serves much of rural eastern Idaho. The campus still occupies that contested patch of land that took a legislative gamble, a real estate fight, and a senator's personal land donation to secure, more than a century ago.