Frederick Watts and the Birth of Penn State
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
On a one-hundred-sixteen-acre tract near this site, agricultural reformer Frederick Watts built a model farm between eighteen fifty-seven and eighteen sixty-seven, experimenting with scientific methods at a time when most Pennsylvania farmers worked as their grandfathers had. His ideas about farm efficiency, expressed in his site design, layout, and building plans, were ahead of their time.
Watts served as the first president of the Pennsylvania Agricultural Society in eighteen fifty-one and was a co-founder of the Farmers' High School, the institution that eventually became Penn State University. He later served as United States Commissioner of Agriculture from eighteen seventy-one to eighteen seventy-seven. The model farm he built here stood until nineteen eighty-eight. What he started in this quiet corner of Cumberland County rippled outward into one of the largest public university systems in the country.
