man to keep a free school for the education of the children of the parishes of Elizabeth City and Kiquotan." In 1636, Captain John Mason left one thousand acres of land "for maintaining a free grammar school for the education of youth in New Haven." There were many examples of such personal grants in colonial days.

Public-land grants for education closely followed these private benefactions. For the maintenance or support of a school, Boston reserved Deer Island (1641), Dorchester reserved Thompson's Island (1639), and later (1657) added one thousand acres of land. This step was followed by the granting of lands by the colonial governments to towns or counties for the support of schools. Each of four counties in Connecticut, for example, received, in 1672, six hundred acres of land for the support of a grammar school. The General Court of Massachusetts, in 1659, granted one thousand acres of land each to Charlestown and Cambridge with the understanding that the land was to be forever appropriated to the support of grammar schools.

The next step in the development of land-grant policies was taken when the colonies reserved a portion of their unsettled lands for school purposes. Connecticut unwittingly set the precedent for this policy in 1726. Thirty-nine years before, in order to embarrass the royal governor, Andros, the colony had granted a portion of what is now Litchfield County to the towns of Windsor

and Hartford. Contrary to colonial expectation, the towns refused to cede back the land at the termination of the trouble. A compromise was effected in 1726 by which each of the two towns kept half of its original grant. The other half was divided into seven townships. Five of these townships were further subdivided into fifty-three parts each. "Three parts in each town were reserved, one for the support of the town school and two for the ministry." This did not settle the matter, for in 1733 the Assembly ordered "that these seven towns be sold and the proceeds divided among the towns of the colony already settled, in proportion to their respective lists of polls and ratable estate, the proceeds to be set apart by each town as a permanent fund, the interest on which is to be faithfully expended for the support of the schools required by law." 1

This action of Connecticut in 1733 is clearly responsible for the first colonial or state permanent school fund of which we have record, and its importance can scarcely be overestimated. The precedent was followed by Georgia in July, 1783, in an act which authorized the Governor to set aside "one thousand acres of vacant land for erecting free schools" in each county. In 1786, the State of New York provided for the survey of its vacant lands into "townships of sixty-four thousand acres" each. A "State Lot" and a "Gospel and

1 Swift's Public Permanent Common School Funds in the United States, p. 35.

School Lot" were reserved in each township. In 1789, provision was made for the sale of the "Gospel and School Lot," — and thus began New York's system of township school funds. Massachusetts took similar action in 1788.

Even before the War for Independence, then, colonial experience had proved the worth of land endowment as a means of insuring free schools. Congress, under the Articles of Confederation, having won the vast public domain as a national asset, followed the established precedent and decreed that Lot No. 16 in each township of this vast domain was to be dedicated to the "maintenance of public schools." The Ordinance of 1787, in the third article, contained the famous declaration,—"Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall be forever encouraged." This language is a reaffirmation, in general terms, of the act of May, 1785, but it is not the declaration by which Lot No. 16 is specifically set aside for public schools.1

1 It was not only in the Ordinance of 1787 that education and religion were coupled together as joint beneficiaries of national bounty. In 1784, Jefferson proposed a plan for disposing of the public lands, but his plan contains no reference to education. Eleven months later, however, Congress considered another bill which granted the sixteenth section for school purposes "and the section immediately adjoining the same to the northward to the support of religion." The latter provision was not repeated in the act of May, 1785, and also failed to appear in the Ordinance of 1787. However, in the reservation of land

How Lot No. 16 was made available to the different states and what it meant to them educationally are topics so important as to deserve a separate chapter.

in 1787 for the Ohio company, Lot 29 is to be given "perpetually for the purposes of religion," and the Symmes contract for the purchase of land in Ohio, 1787, also made reservation of lands for schools and religion, and one township for an institution of higher education.

CHAPTER IV

THE ENDOWMENT MAGNIFICENT

POTENTIALLY, the setting aside of the sixteenth sections constituted a truly magnificent endowment for public education, aggregating, in the territory east of the Mississippi, over seven and a half million acres of land. If all of this land could have been held by the public under a series of ten-year, twenty-year, or even fifty-year leases, it would have yielded a continually increasing revenue, and would have to-day, at the lowest estimate ($3.00 per acre), a rental value of twentytwo and a half million dollars annually. While this sum would be far from sufficient to maintain the public schools of the states carved from the ceded territory, it would be a substantial portion of the total.1 That the contributions of the land-grant endowments in these states fall far short of what they might have been would be a fact the more lamentable, had it not constituted a probably necessary step in the development of a sound public policy in the granting of lands for educational purposes. To know something of the early disposition

1 The average rental value would be much higher. It has been estimated that the rents from the "Lots No. 16" in Cook County, Illinois, would more than meet the annual cost of operating the public schools of the entire state on the present basis of expenditures.