Chapter 26

The Wisconsin White Pine That Built a New York University

Traveling through the Wisconsin counties that contain the Upper Chippewa River watershed, from the headwater counties of Ashland and Bayfield down to Chippewa County, one wouldn't observe a lot that speaks to the relationship the vast region once had with a well-known New York university.

Cornell University, located in Ithaca, New York, is one of the country's most prestigious academic institutions. However, few people today—New Yorkers and Wisconsinites alike—realize that Cornell, founded in 1868, owes its success to the virgin white pine that once grew along the Chippewa River and its tributaries.

The story of how a New Yorker intent on establishing an agriculture and mechanical arts college in his hometown was able to realize his dream thanks to the natural resources of northern Wisconsin began in the midst of the Civil War.

While the War Between the States was raging in 1862, the Union government still had to attend to the needs of a growing country, including the ever-increasing demand for institutions of higher learning. Cash strapped but possessing a huge amount of public land, the government often used land grants as an incentive for economic development, such as the establishment of railroads.

A congressman from Vermont, Justin Smith Morrill, proposed to use this same strategy to meet the demand for colleges. The first Morrill Act, also known as the Land Grant College Act of 1862, provided for the distribution of public land to each state—30,000 acres for each congressional seat held by the state. Proceeds from the sale of this land would provide funds for the establishment and support of an “agriculture and mechanic arts” college in each state (known as land-grant colleges).1 Not all of the states had a sufficient amount of public land within its borders to meet the amount of their land grant, so the act allowed these states to choose public lands in other states.2 Land was issued in the form of land scrip certificates (one certificate equaled 160 acres of land).

A wealthy New Yorker named Ezra Cornell sensed opportunity in the Morrill Act. New York, as the state with the largest number of delegates in Congress, received scrip for nearly a million acres of public land.³ Cornell could realize his dream of a college in his hometown of Ithaca if he could somehow direct or control the sale of New York's great land grant.

After some astute political maneuvering, which involved using his personal fortune to purchase land scrip from the state, Cornell was able to gain control of the scrip to ensure it was utilized for Cornell University.⁴ While many states were acquiring public lands and quickly disposing of them at current market rates for immediate income, Cornell proceeded slowly, looking toward the west for lands that could produce a better return.

Good fortune visited Cornell when friend and former Ithaca resident William A. Woodward suggested he invest the scrip in the pine lands of Wisconsin. Woodward was in Wisconsin and was witness to the growing lumber and land speculation business there.

According to Paul Wallace Gates, author of The Wisconsin Pine Lands of Cornell University, a Study in Land Policy and Absentee Ownership, Cornell's decision to invest the bulk of the New York land grant in Wisconsin was to become “one of the largest and ultimately most successful land speculations in American history.”⁵

Speculation in public lands had been a part of the picture in Wisconsin since statehood in 1848. Gates wrote: “By 1865 the public domain in Wisconsin had been reduced to ten or eleven million acres, most of which was in the northern half of the state.”⁶

When Ezra Cornell entered the scene in the mid-1800s he became associated with a land agent named Henry C. Putnam of Eau Claire. Putnam was familiar with the region and knew where the most productive tracts of pine were located.⁷

Gates wrote: “Putnam began operations in a big way when told to go ahead and locate Cornell's scrip. He employed land hunters to roam the Chippewa and its tributaries, the Flambeau, the Jump, the Thornapple and the Red Cedar.”⁸

By 1867 Cornell had acquired nearly five hundred thousand acres of land in Wisconsin, most of it pine land. Cornell's acquisitions effectively made him and Cornell University “the largest single owner of pine lands in the northwest, aside from the railroads and the governments of Wisconsin and the U.S.”⁹

The Wisconsin White Pine That Built a New York University Acquiring the land was just the beginning. To make money for the university, Cornell then had to sell the land. Because he had acquired large tracts of choice pine in very remote areas of the Upper Chippewa, it would take some time and patience for the land's value to increase sufficiently to make good returns.

Although some small land sales were made in the 1860s, Cornell began to see significant sales only in the 1870s. By this time it was clear to university trustees that Ezra Cornell had taken on a bigger project than he was capable of managing. Cornell, according to Gates, “had little conception of the magnitude or complexity of the burden or of the risks he assumed.”10 In 1874 the university trustees, under the direction of lumberman Henry W. Sage, took control of the land operation.¹¹ Sage, unlike Cornell, was a shrewd judge of pine lands and began to make very profitable sales for the university.

In the early 1880s forces joined to produce a sharp increase in the value of Wisconsin pine lands. A developing scientific forestry-management movement led some to predict that the pine would soon be gone if not better managed.¹² This helped fuel the demand for the remaining pine. At this same time the U.S. economy was pulling itself out of a recession and the lumber business was good.

Sage made a sale to the lumber company Weyerhaeuser that netted the university $1,841,746.¹³ A sale to lumber company Knapp-Stout in 1880 netted $477,550.¹⁴ Cornell stumpage sales in 1887 totaled $746,461.¹⁵ By 1893 most of the valuable Cornell land had been sold.

According to Cornell University: “When all of the timber and land had been sold and the administration of the Western lands was closed in 1935, the university had generated a gross of $6.8 million and a net of $5.1 million. While New York had received one tenth of the 1862 land grant, the University's management of the scrip yielded one third of the total grant revenues generated by all the states.”¹⁶ By comparison, Wisconsin had received a 240,000-acre land grant that netted the University of Wisconsin about $300,000.¹⁷

Gates wrote: “Otherwise the Badger state has forgotten the connection it once had with the institution at Ithaca. Cornell alumni, students and faculty, on the other hand, should cherish the memory of their founding father's wisdom in undertaking the great land venture in Wisconsin…nor should they be unaware of the cost of the investment to the state of Wisconsin.”¹⁸