NEO A&M: Born from the Zinc Rush

The college you're passing in Miami, Oklahoma has a very specific origin story. In nineteen nineteen, Governor Robertson signed Senate Bill Two Twenty-Five creating the Miami School of Mines, an institution purpose-built to serve the booming Tri-State Lead and Zinc District sprawling across northeastern Oklahoma, southeastern Kansas, and southwestern Missouri. Classes began in September nineteen twenty in downtown Miami, before the school settled onto its own campus.

Zinc and lead were running at full roar. The school converted to a junior college in nineteen twenty-four as mining declined, and took its current name, Northeastern Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College, in nineteen forty-three. Today it's one of Oklahoma's top two-year colleges, though no one who walks its campus needs to know anything about ore grades to enroll.