Evan Pugh: Penn State's First President

Evan Pugh served as the first president of Pennsylvania State University from eighteen fifty-nine until his death in eighteen sixty-four, and in those five years he shaped what a land-grant university could be. Pugh had trained as an agricultural chemist in Europe, earning his doctorate in Germany at a time when American universities rarely offered advanced scientific education. He returned convinced that science applied to farming and industry could transform rural life.

At Penn State, then called the Farmers High School, he pushed for rigorous scientific curriculum and helped secure the college's inclusion in the federal Morrill Act of eighteen sixty-two, which funded land-grant institutions across the country. Three miles south of here he conducted his own agricultural research at Jordan Bank Academy. He died at thirty-six, but the university he built into an institution of national standing outlasted him by generations.