University of Maine: Lincoln's Land Grant in the Pines

The University of Maine exists because Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Land-Grant Act in July of eighteen sixty-two, in the middle of the Civil War. The law granted federal land to every state to fund practical colleges focused on agriculture, engineering, and the mechanical arts, institutions for working people, not just the classical elite. Maine received two hundred ten thousand acres, sold them for an endowment of a hundred and eighteen thousand dollars, and in eighteen sixty-five chartered the Maine State College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts.

Instruction began in Orono in eighteen sixty-eight, Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect, was hired to design the campus, though his full plan was largely rejected. The school took its current name, the University of Maine, in eighteen ninety-seven. It is both the state's land-grant university and its sea-grant university, reflecting Maine's dual identity as a farming and maritime state.

The alumni list spans an extraordinary range. Bernard Lown, class of nineteen forty-two, became a cardiologist, co-invented the modern defibrillator, and won the Nobel Peace Prize as co-founder of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. And Stephen King graduated in nineteen seventy with a degree in English, went on to become the best-selling horror novelist in American history, and has never really left Maine, his fiction is saturated with the geography of this state.

For a land-grant school in a small northern state, that is a quietly remarkable record.