Benjamin Thompson and the Gift of a University

The plaque here honors Benjamin Thompson of Durham, New Hampshire, and without him there might be no University of New Hampshire at all. Thompson was a successful farmer and entrepreneur who died in eighteen ninety, leaving the bulk of his estate, roughly five hundred thousand dollars and hundreds of acres of land, to fund an agricultural college in his home state. His bequest became the founding endowment of what was then called the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts.

The institution moved from Hanover, where it had been attached to Dartmouth, to Durham in eighteen ninety-three, settling on Thompson's own donated farmland. It was renamed the University of New Hampshire in nineteen twenty-three. The Class of nineteen thirty-three erected this tablet in gratitude, calling it a debt the university owed to one man's vision.

Thompson never saw the campus, but the campus grew from what he gave.