Coe College and the Farmer's Condition

Coe College traces its origins to eighteen fifty-one and to a financial transaction that says something precise about the values of the Iowa frontier. The Reverend Williston Jones was traveling the eastern United States raising money to send Iowa students to seminaries elsewhere when he met a farmer named Daniel Coe. Coe gave Jones fifteen hundred dollars, a substantial sum for a working farmer in eighteen fifty-one, and attached a condition: the college Jones founded must educate women alongside men.

It was an unusual demand for its moment. Co-education in American higher education was still contested territory, and many established institutions had not yet accepted it. But Coe made his terms clear and Jones accepted them.

The Cedar Rapids Collegiate Institute opened in eighteen fifty-three as a co-educational institution, years before that was the norm. The college went through a series of name changes and financial struggles that were standard for frontier institutions. It was reestablished as Coe College Institute in eighteen seventy-five and formally incorporated as Coe College in eighteen eighty-one, taking the name of its original benefactor.

The institution has been affiliated with the Presbyterian Church throughout its history. Today Coe College occupies a residential campus northeast of downtown, a small liberal arts institution of roughly fourteen hundred students with an average class size of sixteen. Its roster of distinguished alumni includes figures across science, politics, and the arts.

The college Daniel Coe funded with a farmer's savings, on the condition that it open equally to everyone, has had a longer reach than he could have imagined.