The College on the Hill: A New History of the Ontario Agricultural College, 1874-1999

Index

Preface

THE ONTARIO AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE began in 1874 to help improve the province’s farming through education and research. Having just legislated mandatory elementary education, the Ontario government intended Guelph to be one of several institutional capstones that would ensure the province’s position in an internationally competitive world that was being transformed through scientific discoveries and technological achievements. Farming was the foremost occupation in the province and agriculture the primary basis for prosperity.

This book questions the changing role that the OAC has assumed in fulfilling its mandate to provide agricultural education. The American land-grant college system provided the inspiration for Guelph, but Ontario was not so generous in providing an endowment to the new institution. For ninety years the agricultural college remained part of the provincial civil service. As the school was dependent on annual legislative appropriations, it attempted to win as many friends as possible by impressing its importance on the province’s farmers. Extension education grew, but the provincial agriculture ministry also turned to the college to provide testing and laboratory services. The OAC thereby acquired a peculiar hue among post-secondary institutions that, at least in regard to political control, made it unique in Canada.

The formation of the University of Guelph in 1964 brought fundamental changes in the way the college interpreted its mandate. The freedom obtained, with whatever vicissitudes, produced a stronger intellectual climate more on par with international standards. Despite continuing metamorphoses, the college remained dedicated to improvement in agriculture through science, but changes in the latter part of the twentieth century necessitated greater attention to rural society as well. As government support declined for both education and research, the college increasingly turned its eye towards the needs of agribusiness and provoked debate within a critical university environment.

As the education provided by the college was intended to serve a specific constituency, one of the premises of this book is that agricultural education cannot be understood apart from larger agricultural developments that have transformed farming. In a little over a century, vast numbers of farmers disappeared in Canada as they did in most developed countries. As agriculture became more efficient and capital intensive, the nature of agricultural education altered. The questions animating research changed as well because science unfolded in larger amplitude.

The college motto—No Day Without Learning—summed up the inspiration of the college’s founders that agriculture would profit more people through the application of scientific thinking. Agriculture possessed little innate coherence except in the minds of those united to advance its interests; its representatives carried forward ideas about the possibilities for agricultural improvement that had originated in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The ways in which to achieve such improvement have varied to such enormous extent over time that after 1975 the entire concept of progressive change was itself challenged.

This book grew out of The College on the Hill: A History of the Ontario Agricultural College, 1874–1974, which Alex Ross published in 1974. Developments have been so rapid since then that it would be unwise to compare the two volumes. Researchers intent on finding particular details are therefore advised that it is necessary to consult both books. As various academic departments have also written their own histories, much can also be found in them that had to be excluded here.

Although this volume and its predecessor were assisted financially by the Ontario Agricultural College, they both resulted from free intellectual inquiry. They are not official history. A critical perspective is vital if we are not only to understand the past but also benefit from that knowledge. The views expressed in this volume are solely those of the authors, who also bear responsibility for errors.

So many people have assisted in the production of this book and the previous one that it is impossible to credit them individually without overlooking someone. Suffice it to say that archivists retrieved documents, university administrators dug out files in storage, graduate student assistants helped assiduously with research, and colleagues agreed to interviews, answered phone calls, and responded to e-mail messages. Others were kind enough to read drafts of later chapters. Some debts that we have incurred are acknowledged in the footnotes.

We do not believe it a conceit to say that one of the prime virtues of a mid-sized university such as Guelph is that people help each other to a remarkable degree and that this cooperation is based on traditions inherited from the university’s three founding colleges: the Ontario Agricultural College, the Ontario Veterinary College, and the now defunct Macdonald Institute that provided education for women under the OAC’s wing for seven decades. What is perhaps more phenomenal is that such cooperation has persisted at Guelph despite the human meat-slicing in Ontario’s universities during the recent past.

Alexander Ross and Terry Crowley

University Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph, Alexander M. Ross is the author of William Henry Bartlett: Artist, Author, and Traveller, The College on the Hill: A History of the Ontario Agricultural College, 1874–1974, and The Imprint of the Picturesque on Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. His memoirs were published as Slow March to a Regiment and as A Year and a Day in 1992 and 1997. As well, Professor Ross has contributed many articles to popular and scholarly journals.

Professor of History at the University of Guelph, Terry Crowley has written about various facets of Canada’s history. Among his books are Clio’s Craft: A Primer of Historical Methods, One Voice: A History of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association (with C. A. V Barker), Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality, which won the W. C. Good Writing Award of the Rural Learning Association, and Canadian History to 1867: The Birth of a Nation. Terry Crowley has contributed sections on the French regime to The Concise History of Christianity in Canada and rural labour to Labouring Lives: Work and Workers in Nineteenth-Century Ontario, which won the Ontario Historical Society’s J. J. Talman Award. From 1995 to 1998 he was also editor of the journal Ontario History.

Chapter One

A School for Scandal

TO UNDERSTAND HOW a modest venture in agricultural education became a school for scandal in Guelph during the 1870s requires an imaginative leap into times past. Canada’s federal state had just been born in 1867, ending previous agonies and creating new ones, but the country remained a British colony. The province of Ontario was created by the Confederation pact, but political parties had not yet assumed their definitive twentieth-century form. So little held together Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ontario that political patronage sufficed as temporary glue. While Conservative and Liberal parties sought to bridge enormous divides by making themselves more than the expression of their individual parts, bitter partisanship was rife. Newspapers gave expression to political conflicts, but they were often as generally dependent on party patronage as on circulation or advertising revenues.

Quebec was French Canadian, but the Maritime provinces and Ontario were overwhelmingly British in character, values, and outlook. While there were pockets of people in Ontario with different ancestries such as Germans in Waterloo County, the Québécois were only beginning to cross their western border into Ontario in 1870. The majority of Ontarians had either been born in Britain or Ireland or were descended from British or Irish forebears. Immigration had peaked in 1857 and then fallen in a calamitous depression characteristic of disastrous nineteenth-century business cycles. The American Civil War deterred many from making the risky journey to take up new lands in North America, but when the conflict ended in 1865, the eyes of the Western world were then trained on the vast expanses of the American midwest. In the competition for new immigrants, Ontario fared badly in the competition for immigrants until the end of the century.

Agriculture was Canada’s foremost occupation except on the Atlantic coasts, where fishing provided income. The 1871 census found that 78% of Ontarians lived in rural areas and that half the gainfully employed in the province depended directly on agriculture for their livelihood. Farming was so prevalent that no note was taken of the number of farmers, but 172,258 occupiers of rural properties were identified.¹ Even though great social and economic inequalities were distinctly visible in the countryside, 84% of rural occupiers were owners rather than tenants or managers, and an equal percentage fell into a very broad middle of those located on properties varying between 4.5 and 81 hectares (11 and 200 acres). The structure of Ontario’s agriculture was more like that in American northern and midwestern states than in the United Kingdom, where great landed estates remained.

In 1870 the province had not fully advanced beyond the settlement era. The assault on southern Ontario’s forests continued with a vengeance akin to that seen among Brazilian campeñsinos during the next century. Stump-littered fields made farming difficult and returns low, and the removal of trees created soil erosion, turning waterways into spring’s raging torrents and summer’s pitiful creeks. Soon deserts appeared in areas such as Norfolk County, where winds whipped denuded lands into sand dunes similar to what occurred later in northern China on a more mammoth scale. Wheat was the principal cash crop in most places because it fetched the most income in domestic markets or through export, but frequent soil mining for profit depleted the land’s fertility to such an extent that Ontario compared badly with Europe in field output per hectare. To increase productivity, many farmers eagerly sought to reduce labour costs through mechanization even though most machines were as yet rudimentary. In 1871 a surprising 79% of farms larger than 4.5 hectares possessed fanning mills to separate wheat from chaff, while 24% owned the more sophisticated and costly reapers and mowers. Cheap land was beginning to disappear and farming to emerge slowly as business rather than avocation.

As the age was transitional, orthodoxies appeared only within particular groups; human division arising out of contradiction prevailed. The Ontario Agricultural College became embroiled in those conflicts and emerged as a school for scandal partially because agriculture was an immense political hot potato. Canadian democracy was limited to male voters and men dominated farm organizations, but women remained central to agricultural production in ways seldom acknowledged publicly by the other sex. Farmers were ever a motley crowd divided by the nature of their enterprise and their incomes. After 1867 the new Department of Agriculture in Ottawa and Ontario’s Bureau of Agriculture, headed by a commissioner, were only embryo ministries effecting most of their work through voluntary organizations that received public subsidies to implement government policies. Larger numbers of people participated in agricultural societies based on region—63 societies at the county level and 260 among townships by 1867—but specialty lines were emerging. A provincial Fruit Growers’ Association had been formed in 1857, the Entomological Society of Ontario in 1863, the Canadian Dairymen’s Association in 1868, the Ayrshire Breeders’ Association in 1870, and the Ontario Dairymen’s Association two years later. Fairs and exhibitions around the countryside, often supported financially by government, served to disseminate ideas to larger audiences.

A New Farm in Upper Canada. (Canada Farmer, February 1, 1865)

Outside the political arena, where they were a force to be reckoned with if a plurality could be found, farmers did not know who they were. Then as now, the sum was often described by its parts, however shifting they might be; agriculture was associated with primary production from common natural elements that most often resulted in food of some sort. At least until the middle of the next century, no one was sure whether farmers were labourers or business people. Such uncertainties did not stop individuals from adopting rigid beliefs that governed private conduct as well as public life. Most significant for the beginnings of Ontario’s agricultural college was the division between those who thought about collective problems and who had the ear of the government, and those who did not.

Modernizers, or improvers, dominate agricultural history because they held out a vision of future prosperity. They prided themselves on pursuing an enlightened empiricism, on being fact gatherers pursuing an inventory science akin to that undertaken by geologists and biologists.² Truth was determined by observation, in their view, not laboratory experiment, and ultimately came from God. Among their allies stood the census takers, whose output became only decennial in 1871, and the later provincial Bureau of Industries that annually published the eclectic views of farmers on a host of issues relating to their businesses. Through an advisory body such as the provincial Board of Agriculture or the Agricultural and Arts Association, which operated with government subsidy, as well as through a monopoly over the printed word, modernizers sought to appropriate science to agriculture. The true farmer, one of their spokesmen said in 1871, is a member of the noblest of professions; he is a chemist, a mechanic, an astronomer, a botanist, and in fine, an intelligent observer of God’s works in nature; a man of intellect as well as of action.³

Sowing seed, 1869 (Ontario Farmer, 1869)

In the nineteenth century the modernizing message was predicated on deeply held beliefs about progress in human affairs, beliefs that were subsequently destroyed by the twentieth century’s unprecedented horrors and its unravelling of mysteries previously shrouding the sciences. Scientific agriculture, it was argued, would bring untold prosperity through the application of the human mind, learning from observation, and benefiting from what science and technology offered. Such views reflected longstanding British empiricism more than the significant German traditions about to enter the United States, most forcefully through the establishment of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1876. There, new trends in American education were begun through emphasis on research, graduate education, and German scientific methods in a host of academic disciplines. Equally important were the great controversies aroused by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). Darwin’s contributions asserted the importance of wedding theoretical understanding to observation or fact gathering.

Except for the nascent University of Toronto and its University College, Canadian higher education had sprung largely from Christian denominations. Church colleges struggling with denominational financial support fostered beliefs that education predicated on classical learning served moral purposes, but a strong utilitarian streak for immediately beneficial knowledge surfaced among those who had to earn a living in order to survive. British immigrant writer Susanna Moodie, who was a failed farmer’s wife, understood that education kindled a love of learning, but that it must also be relevant. The want of education and moral training, she wrote, "is the only real barrier that exists between the classes of men. Nature, reason, and Christianity, recognize no other. In particular, Moodie urged Canadian farmers to place their offspring in a situation to acquire solid and useful information, from masters who will not merely teach them to repeat lessons like parrots, by rote; but will teach them to think—to know the meaning of what they learn—and to be able by the right use of those reflective faculties, to communicate the knowledge thus acquired to others."⁴

Moodie’s counsel was wise, but colleges and universities are ever disputatious. Conflicts over the purposes of higher education later rehearsed in regard to agricultural instruction had found expression publicly a decade earlier when provincial superintendent of education Egerton Ryerson and University of Toronto historian Daniel Wilson debated the nature of the college curriculum. Ryerson, who believed that farm training had no place beyond schools, argued that universities existed to cultivate language and reason in order to produce that intellectual discipline, without which there is no intellectual progress throughout life. His opponent contended that the classical subjects dominating the academy were neither the only, nor necessarily the best, with which to cultivate the mind. The future president of the University of Toronto argued that more attention needed to be given to actual business of life since the practical utility of many new subjects has been forcing them into the established studies of the Universities. Daniel Wilson admitted that educational departures were likely to be hotly contested. Old prejudices are not easily overcome, he said, especially in Universities.

Informed agricultural commentators knew little about such intellectual conflicts, but they were convinced that the province must keep up with developments south of the border where the federal Morrill Act of 1862 had led to the formation of land-grant colleges, which were required by law to teach agriculture and the mechanic arts. If the province did not progress, it condemned itself to being a backwater of the irresolute and unimaginative. Since Ontario exported agricultural products to European markets, where new institutions of higher learning to suppport farm enterprises had also been established, a provincial initiative seemed doubly warranted. The chief questions became: what type of education was to be provided, where, and who could control the result by paying for it? The answers were worked out only after much controversy, but they resulted in an Ontario agricultural college significantly different from its American counterparts. The provincial agricultural school was accorded less autonomy and consequently enjoyed less academic freedom than those in the United States. Until the creation of the University of Guelph nine decades later, the Ontario Agricultural College was a political football tossed between politicians and scholars.

I

Political control and a strict emphasis on practical farming differentiated Ontario’s new agriculture school from its American counterparts and those smaller, more fragmented agricultural colleges developing in Quebec, where the influence of the Roman Catholic church in education was growing. In the short term, the need to do something for advanced agricultural instruction arose out of failure. Englishman and agricultural journalist George Buckland had been appointed professor of agriculture at the University of Toronto in 1851. He created a ten-hectare experimental farm in the area lying between University College and Bloor Street, but he attracted only a handful of students, who managed to graduate with a diploma in agriculture before the university closed the program in 1864. The Bureau of Agriculture and the Agricultural and Arts Association pushed for initiatives that would benefit their industry on the basis of the negative consequences of Toronto’s failed experiment. The literary has over-shadowed and extinguished the other. The general has overpowered the special, one Association president said in criticizing the placement of agricultural instruction within a city university.⁵

Ontario’s first government, John Sandfield Macdonald’s Liberal-Conservative coalition, was committed to major reform of the province’s rudimentary educational apparatus now under provincial jurisdiction as a result of the Confederation pact. In Toronto, various groups joined to establish a school of applied science and engineering. Free and compulsory education was implemented in the province in 1871, but the new legislation applied only to children aged seven to twelve during four months of the year. Two Conservatives in the cabinet, provincial secretary Matthew Cameron and John Carling, commissioner of agriculture and arts, supported these measures. In 1871 Cameron had shepherded through the provincial assembly controversial education legislation that was adamantly opposed by those who thought it an unjust infringement on parental rights and did not want to be taxed to send their children to school. Modern elementary education in Ontario began in 1871, but it was another half-century before high schools were democratized.

Within this climate the suggestion by Guelph journalist and cleric William F. Clarke for a provincial agricultural college was well-timed. After Ontario’s political wars about denominational education, there was no question that such a facility would be anything but secular. Aware of the growth of American land-grant colleges, John Sandfield Macdonald received Clarke’s idea warmly, and John Carling appointed him to see what American developments meant for Canadians. Although this departure breached party lines that were not as yet fully hardened, it also showed that political loyalties could be set aside in the face of common beliefs. An advocate of agricultural improvement and a builder of his denomination’s church in Guelph, William Clarke had strong links to an emerging Liberal party through George Brown, the well-known journalist and politician, who had appointed him editor of Canada Farmer before he founded his own short-lived newspaper, Ontario Farmer, in 1869. Clarke had a reputation as someone whose hard knocks and straight talk brought him often into hot water.⁶ He was a professed modernizer criticized in his own pages by those who thought that advanced education in agriculture was worse than wasted money. Farming was picked up on the spot, his opponents argued, and not taught in fancy educational institutions at public expense, particularly as schooling made young men dissatisfied with the intensive labours of farm life and with the isolation imposed by roads that were impassable much of the year. Controversy surrounding fundamental issues and personalities arose the moment William Clarke accepted John Carling’s commission.

The instructions William Clarke received to guide his U.S. tour established the parameters for much of what later transpired. The minister journalist, Carling wrote, was to submit an economical and practical scheme for the establishment of an Agricultural College in this Province.⁷ The two words economical and practical dominated discourse from the time Clarke submitted his report in 1870. He had visited at least three American institutions: Massachusetts Agricultural College at Amherst, Michigan Agricultural College at East Lansing, and the Agricultural Department in Washington. Although Washington, like Toronto, lacked some systematic and trustworthy mode of collecting facts, especially during the seeding, growing and harvesting seasons, Clarke was greatly impressed by the entomological studies carried on in Washington by Professor Townsend Glover, and he recommended that something be done to render Entomology of practical service in Ontario. The cleric had high praise for the agricultural colleges in Massachusetts and Michigan, but he thought that the palm of superiority should go to the latter.

Impressed by U.S. federal legislation, Clarke recommended that Ontario’s projected college be placed in the free grant region of unsettled public lands with 8,100 hectares set aside as an endowment.⁹ At Amherst, Clarke noted, every student was required to labour two hours on alternate days, as a College exercise. For this no pay was given, but for all extra labour students were paid at the rate of 12 1/2 cents per hour. At Michigan each student had to work on the farm three hours each day. This labour clause, Clarke reported, effectually prevented the development of caste among the students, and it made labour appear respectable and inviting to the young men. The failure of Toronto’s agricultural program left a lasting influence.

CORN SHELLER,

Shelling corn, 1880 (Farmers’ and Farm Labourers’ Guide, 1880).

Since the Ontario Liberals were known as tax-conscious proponents of small government, and as Clarke’s own education at Toronto’s Congregational Academy had been vocational, he was full of praises for those things considered practical and sensible about the two American colleges. He said little about the emphasis that Michigan placed on the importance of liberal education for the farming classes. He did, however, outline Michigan’s course of instruction, which included history, English literature, rhetoric, mental and moral philosophy, and French. He also drew attention to the importance given to the physical sciences—botany, chemistry, and animal physiology—and pointed out that practical agriculture, stockbreeding, entomology, and meteorology were prominent features of the course. He further noted that Declamations and Compositions were taught throughout student programs.

The early debts of Ontario’s agricultural college to American example were severely slanted as a result of Clarke’s report because his own knowledge was limited and his outlook narrow. Clarke’s Ontario audience could, therefore, understand only a little about the great changes occurring in American agricultural education. What his report did in large measure was direct attention to the importance of combining science with practical instruction as seen at Michigan Agricultural College, although intellectual developments were rapidly displacing this example. By the middle of the nineteenth century, European influences meant that science in the United States was being put on the modern experimental basis as a result of the teachings and writings of such masters as Liebig at Giessen and Munich, Boussingault at Paris, and Johnston at Edinburgh.⁸ For instance, in 1862 the first president of Pennsylvania Agricultural College, Evan Pugh, had won his doctorate from the University of Göttingen and undertaken research under Lawes at Rothamsthed. Science itself was in upheaval as individuals like University of Toronto biologist R. Ramsay Wright sought to move beyond enlightened empiricism in favour of the greater methodological rigour afforded by controlled experimentation in the laboratories that arrived at that university in 1878.

Had Clarke sought to tap trends in scientific thought, his ideas about manual labour might have been modified in spite of Michigan’s long-standing example. What seems to have influenced him most was what he saw on the ground and read in college calendars. He recognized the importance of the land-grant provision of the Morrill Act but failed to grasp its liberal nature, which left the way open for relative autonomy and the inclusion of the humanities in agricultural education (since social sciences had yet to be invented). Americans also debated the nature of newly opening educational vistas, but gradually it came to be realized that to restrict industrial education to the narrowly vocational . . . was to limit rather than to extend popular opportunity at the higher educational levels.¹⁰ Clarke’s thought tended to follow more closely the ideas of ebullient Illinois instructor Jonathan B. Turner, who distrusted the content and objectives of the traditional university curriculums steeped in classical subjects. Turner championed the complete separation of the land-grant colleges from the old universities.

The parallel between the educational needs of the American working classes and those in Canada were close, even though the northern country was slower in coming to the end of its first heady round of industrialization. Both Canada and the United States still lacked adequate secondary school programs; for many years the land-grant colleges had to admit students with only elementary education. That universities were unassailable bastions of middle and upper class privilege did not go unnoticed. What less wealthy students needed, British historian and Toronto journalist Goldwin Smith pointed out, were universities founded specially for students who had their bread to win and whose degree would be a passport to employment.¹¹ For some, such attainment resided in superior intellectual skills, while for others the immediately instrumental was paramount.

The founders of the Ontario School of Agriculture were impressed by the fact that manual labour had been a part of the training at Michigan since 1857. Manual labour had a democratic quality about it that appealed to rural people and went far to convince the sceptical of the merits of an agricultural education by which a farmer’s son could become a master farmer, skilled and expert in the business of running a farm. Here was the utilitarian aspect of the Ontario modernizers’ vision intended to dampen opposition from critics who thought that farming was primarily physical labour. In their constellation, science was not a body of theory whose frontiers were to be expanded by the human mind for humanity’s benefit. Rather, science was predicated on observation, and it was immediately beneficial precisely because it was useful in arresting declining productivity through bringing the greater economic returns seen in other countries. Thus, in 1878 the Ontario government opened the School of Practical Science, which was shortly subsumed within the University of Toronto. Similarly, while a college education in agriculture would provide enough scientific knowledge to understand the ways in which farming might change in order to be more profitable, manual labour would drive home a methodical routine supposed to reside at the heart of scientific discovery. Having learned to respect work, a boy (since girls were never considered) would be much more likely to remain on the land. The discipline of hard work was also often regarded as strengthening moral fibre since it subdued the wilfulness of youth. Besides, it would help pay the bills.

The farm buildings at George Brown’s Bow Park farm outside Brantford in 1875. Two dozen men, women, and children were employed here and another dozen added for harvesting. Brown wanted the farm to be the site of the school of agriculture. (Canada Farmer, January 15, 1875)

As private farm schools had popped up in the countryside to teach farming as a trade, genuinely higher education in the subject needed to provide instruction of a different order, one that was designed to reach the cream of the crop. The president of Cornell University, where the New York State Agricultural College was located, made this point in 1874 after upheaval on his campus over the matter. The proper place for a young man to learn the trade of farming was on the farm, not at college, he said. Rudimentary education as to implements and processes, can be got nowhere else so well as on the farm, the president maintained. None other else can supply the demand. Multiply your endowments for agricultural education by the millions, and you cannot meet this demand. You cannot supersede these myriad farm schools in every valley and on every hillside. Attempt to do it, and you fritter away your endowment, and simply add one poor farm to the myriads of good ones.¹² Cornell’s president offered good advice without resonance among the founders of the Ontario’s agricultural college. They and their successors adopted some elements of the American experience while rejecting others.

II

Within a year of receiving William Clarke’s report and just before a provincial election that defeated the coalition administration in 1871, John Carling and the Sandfield Macdonald ministry purchased a site for the new agricultural school near Mimico Station. Overriding the cleric’s recommendation for a landed endowment, the government bought land valued at $45,728 and accepted a tender to erect a college building worth $47,900 that was to be completed by January 1, 1873. A further $44,774 was considered necessary for drainage, water supply, farm buildings, fences, roads, plans and superintendence, planting, etc.¹³ In the meantime, starting in 1872, Oliver Mowat’s Liberals began thirty-four years of ascendency in Ontario.

Disappointed with the results his inquiry had produced, William Clarke leapt into action. At the beginning of 1872, he wrote to provincial secretary Peter Gow of Guelph asking that the questions of placement and site quality be reconsidered. After objecting to the stiff, hungry, barren clay at Mimico, the monotonous level of the land, the lack of running water, and the proximity of the Humber marshes, Clarke pleaded for a location in some country town, already the market and business centre of a great agricultural district, where it will both attract and radiate most beneficial influences.¹⁴ Clarke also objected to any proposed plan to affiliate with the University of Toronto on the grounds that he knew of no instance in which a chair of agriculture connected with a general institution of learning had been successful in drawing around it any large body of students, or exerting any appreciable influence upon the agricultural interests of a community or country. Although he paid tribute to George Buckland’s work, he believed that the study of agriculture at Toronto had been overshadowed by other studies; farming elbowed out by other professions. Reflecting a common contemporary prejudice that saw farmers as rough and crude, but wanting them to become more than that, Clarke asserted that agricultural students would feel themselves of an inferior grade to those who were studying for the legal, medical, or clerical professions. . . . He therefore asked for a separate college and experimental farm, away from Toronto or any other large centre, where without sacrifice of respectability or loss of caste, they the students could doff the gown and trencher, put on the smock-frock, and handle the dung-fork or the hoe in the actual manipulations of farm work. Special pleading proved politically effective in light of Toronto’s failure.

Because of doubts expressed about the suitability of the Mimico site for the new school, Mowat’s commissioner of agriculture, Archibald McKellar, ordered a thorough investigation and asked the council of the Agricultural and Arts Association for assistance. In addition, McKellar authorized Manly Miles and Robert C. Kedzie of the Michigan Agricultural College to assess the property. In February of 1872 the council went to the new location for the agricultural school and reported against it, stating that the scheme as projected was bound to end in failure. The American professors also thought that a college at Mimico would labour under serious embarrassments; Kedzie said that four of his samples indicated that the soils were far better fitted for making bricks than for raising crops. Although the council pronounced against Mimico for a second time in June, the property naturally had local defenders who wrote to Archibald McKellar arguing that the original location had been excessively denigrated. In their view the site was ideal, the land gently undulating, the view superb, the soil capable of producing good crops, and the assays improperly taken. The fencing was passable, and water was to be found in super-abundance.

When W. F. Clarke decided to expand his campaign by enlisting the support of his old Liberal ally, editor George Brown of the Toronto Globe and Canada Farmer, he discovered a third independent actor in addition to himself and the government. Brown was a formidable journalist/politician who played a major role in Canada’s history, but he was also a gentleman farmer. With Scots ingenuity, George Brown had devised a plan to reduce overhead costs at his Bow Park spread outside Brantford by establishing a model farm to train agriculturalists emigrating from Britain. "I told him plainly that if he came out in opposition to the College in the Globe as he threatened to do, Clarke wrote, it would be my duty to expose his motives."¹⁵

Headed by Matthew Cameron, the opposition Conservatives took the issue of the Mimico deal to the people. The Mail, Toronto’s leading Conservative organ, defended John Carling by arguing that the removal of the proposed college from Mimico was a bit of Liberal trickery and that the negative soil findings were meaningless because the scientific use of fertilizers could make the land fertile. Its rival, the Globe, did not denounce the college following Clarke’s threat but held that the model farm site was one of the bribes or inducements dangled by Sandfield Macdonald and his colleagues before voters during the election of 1871. Controversy at the province’s political centre reverberated around the province.

III

After conferring with Clarke, the new Mowat government moved cautiously in 1872 when F. W. Stone of Guelph offered to sell his 223-hectare Moreton Lodge farm for $70,000—$314 a hectare. The Agricultural and Arts Association reported favourably on property once used for stock raising, even though many of the fields were weed infested and drained only by open ditches. A committee of five prominent farmers that included future agriculture minister John Dryden of Brooklin was also favourably disposed towards the purchase of a site that lay a kilometre south of Guelph and about forty kilometres north of Lake Ontario. This group commented on the good clay loam of the farm where there were about twenty-eight hectares of woodland and twelve to sixteen hectares from which the stumps had not been removed. The committee noted that the farm stood along the main road to Hamilton. The main residence, Moreton Lodge, had been well constructed by Guelph builder Matthew Bell, who was noted for impressive domestic architecture. The large stone mansion house of two stories, substantially built, well finished and covered with slate, the committee reported, might make an agricultural college if lecture-rooms, kitchen and dining room were added. A two-storey stone dwelling house, a small brick cottage, and two frame houses completed the list of farm houses. Barns and sheds built of stone and wood were suitably arranged for stockbreeding. Fences were in good order and buildings were estimated to be worth between $25,000 and $30,000.¹⁶

The farmers’ committee explained that Guelph, a town with a population of 8,000 to 9,000, was situated in beautiful country on the lines of the Grand Trunk and of the Wellington, Grey, and Bruce railways. The community manufactured agricultural implements, machinery, carriages, sewing machines, woollen goods, piano-fortes, organs and melodeons. Three large flour mills, several breweries, churches, common