Rose-Hulman: Engineering's Western Frontier

East of Terre Haute, on a campus that barely existed when the National Road ran through this part of Indiana, sits one of the most highly regarded engineering schools in America. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology has been ranked the number one undergraduate engineering college among schools that do not offer doctorates for more than two decades running, a remarkable distinction for a school most people outside the engineering world have never heard of.

Its founding story is thoroughly Midwestern. Chauncey Rose was a railroad builder who kept running into a frustrating problem: he could not find enough trained engineers in the region to do the work he needed done. Rather than import talent from the East indefinitely, he decided to create a school that would produce engineers locally.

On September tenth, eighteen seventy-four, Rose and nine business partners incorporated what they called the Terre Haute School of Industrial Science. Rose donated the land and the bulk of the funding. Despite his insistence on a plain institutional name, the board renamed the school Rose Polytechnic Institute in his honor. Classes began on March seventh, eighteen eighty-three, with an initial class of forty-eight students.

The school made history early. In eighteen eighty-nine it awarded what it believed was the first chemical engineering degree in the country. It was also the first private engineering college established west of the Allegheny Mountains, part of a broader effort to build technical institutions in a region that had long relied on eastern schools for trained professionals.

The Hulman name was added in nineteen seventy-one after a significant gift from the Hulman family, the same family that for decades owned the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. That combination of railroad money at the founding and racing-industry money a century later is, in its own way, a perfect summary of Indiana's industrial history.