That’s not an error in the title. For many, this post will border on the unbelievable. Iowa State University is definitely not in Iowa City. But put aside your disbelief for the moment. This light-hearted post examines word choice through time for Iowa’s first two universities.
For a very long time, Iowa City hosted Iowa State University, the same school as the State University of Iowa, and the University of Iowa. The State University was frequently used to refer to the Iowa City university because the delegates to the 1857 Constitution indicated there was to be only one Iowa university. And back in 1847, one of the first laws of the state was to place the state university in Iowa City. As of 2023, Ames has had the Iowa State University for less time than Iowa City.
As a term, Iowa State University has been in use for a long time. A Google Ngram for the term Iowa State University between 1847 when the University of Iowa was founded until 1959 when the term Iowa State University was given to the university in Ames indicates usage of the term began to increase from near zero in 1855. It peaked in 1877 and remained relatively constant until 1930, when it began to fall in use only to later rebound to a much larger peak after 1960 with the name change of the State Agricultural and Mechanical College. The usage from 1847 parallels the early growth of the state university at Iowa City. The use of the name then drops off during the Great Depression, only to come back into greater use well after the Second World War when the name was officially given to the new state university and former state college located in Ames.
The first general catalogs, the official catalog of courses, departments and faculty, used the term State University of Iowa (State University of Iowa general catalog, 1860–1861). But six years later, the title on the catalog was Iowa State University, a change from the previous year (State University of Iowa general catalog, 1866–1867). As late as 1955, the state legislature was making laws referencing the State University located in Iowa City.
The first mention of a university for Iowa was an act of Congress passed in 1840. It was called “An act granting two townships of land for the use of a university in the Territory of Iowa.” July 20, 1840, Chapter 90.” The law permanently reserved seventy-two sections from federal lands in the Iowa Territory that “had been obtained or could be obtained” from the Indigenous people of the territory. For the moment, we will put to one side the process of obtaining legal title to the land that is Iowa from the indigenous peoples. The land was designated for the purpose of a state university at such time that Iowa became a state.
The directive by Congress to reserve federal land was affirmed by the ordinance adopted in part by the participants at the 1846 Iowa Constitutional Convention. While Congress directed the land should be held perpetually, the final draft of the 1846 Constitution actually opened the opportunity for multiple state university campuses by allowing for branches to be established and the land to be sold (Convention Journal p.xxx–xxi, 1846 Constitution p. 414).
The next year, two laws, among the first in the State of Iowa, were passed on February 25, 1847 by the first General Assembly of Iowa. One provided for an agent to select the two townships that would be used for the state university. The phrase, for use by the university, was freely interpreted and it ended up meaning land to sell off for the benefit of the state university, rather than land the university, or its branches, was to be physically built on. The other was titled “An Act to establish a state university.” Section 1 of the law permanently established the state university at Iowa City (Acts First General Assembly, Chapter 122, p. 151 and Chapter 125, p. 156). In due course, this law was part of the reason the capitol grounds, or statehouse grounds, were given to the state university.
Confusingly, The Constitution that was ratified in 1857 changed the stipulation of a multiple campus concept with the provision that “The State University shall be established at one place without branches at any other place, and the University fund shall be applied to that Institution and no other.” This change is thought to have been a compromise to get enough votes to move the capital to Des Moines (Briggs, Iowa Journal of History, Vol 14, p. 71). The idea of the State University being the only university prevailed for the next one hundred years. William Penn Clarke had predicted this outcome during the 1846 Constitutional Convention (Shambaugh, History of the Constitutions of Iowa, 1902, p. 323). As an abolitionist who was also associated with the xenophobic Know Nothing political movement, Clarke was a complex personality, but he was mostly correct in his assertion that the state university was to be a bargaining point in Iowa politics.
In legal usage, the name of this university was and is the State University of Iowa, abbreviated as SUI. Variations came into both popular and official use including the University of Iowa in 1964. But before 1959, Iowa State University meant the single state university that by law was to be located in Iowa City.
Some of the variation between State University of Iowa or Iowa State University was just semantics and likely were not viewed to be significant at that time because the meaning was clear either way. For example, compare the name Iowa State University with other units of the State of Iowa, as in Iowa State Board of Education and Iowa State Board of Regents. The term Iowa State is just a convention of language that communicates where the units of government belong. These could also be written as the State Board of Regents of Iowa or the Board of Education of Iowa. Compare this with State Historical Society of Iowa. With only one official university at the time, Iowa State University was easier and shorter for common use, certainly quicker to type and a bit easier to render for printers and sign painters.
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The following is a pictorial exploration of the many times that Iowa State University appears as the name for the state university located in Iowa City, otherwise known as the State University of Iowa, created on February 25, 1847, The University of Iowa.
First up is a lithograph print of the state university campus that was made for the 1865–1866 general catalog. Note the title, Iowa State University, rendered in Spencerian Script at the bottom of the image.
Next, the term Iowa State University appears in an 1866 Iowa law where the state legislature gave the Mechanics Academy building to the university. (Iowa City Republican, July 18, 1866, p. 1)
The university appears in artwork in the border of the 1868 Bird’s Eye Map of Iowa City, Iowa. (Iowa is clearly misspelled, but it would ruin your day to have to remake the entire plate for this very large lithograph after a simple phonetic spelling error.)
From 1868, the masthead of the student newspaper, the University Reporter, an 1868–1879 forerunner to the Daily Iowan, used Iowa State University. The Vidette, which began publication in January 1880, dropped the term.
An 1869 daguerreotype by Isaac A. Wetherby shows the state university campus, in winter. Someone got their ink pen out and inscribed the name, date, and season on the print. Another shout out to Spencer for his Key to Practical Penmanship.
An engraving for the 1870–1871 general catalog used Iowa State.
The Iowa State Press started publishing under this title in 1871 with Jonathon P. Irish as owner. It was a privately held for-profit paper based in Iowa City. Prior to this, it was the Iowa Democratic Press. The state capital had moved to Des Moines in 1857.
A notice for the Iowa State Law Department, now The University of Iowa College of Law, was printed in 1872 (Iowa City Republican, July 31, 1872, p. 2)
In 1873, Drs. J. C. Shrader and E. F. Clapp, two faculty members in the Medical Department at the University of Iowa, now the Carver College of Medicine, submitted a resolution to the County Board of Supervisors to provide mental healthcare to indigent individuals that had been jailed or were inmates at the state asylum in Mt. Pleasant. They proposed the County should fund the treatment of the individuals at the hospital instead of funding their imprisonment. The hospital was just opened. It was operated by the physicians of the Medical Department at the state university and the Sisters of Mercy. The mother house was Mercy Hospital in Davenport. Although there were several building changes, this is now the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, which maintains a statewide presence. A nursing program was established in the 1896–1897 academic year.
The old North Hall, which had the second university library, a non-denominational chapel, the first science department, and women’s lavatory was a frequent backdrop for class photos in the 1870s. There are some class photos from 1874 on the steps of the old North Hall building that proudly state Iowa State. Here is one.
The name Iowa State University reached New York on a fire insurance map of Iowa City made there in 1883. This particular map of the campus was not quite as complete as others that came later, but for this one, the official name give is Iowa State. State University of Iowa appears on most of the maps.
The next example comes from Iowa Historical Record, volume 15, number 1, page 395, which was edited by Frederick Lloyd, MD who served as a surgeon during the Civil War. Here we see Iowa State University and State University of Iowa on the same page.
An obituary for Dr. Elmer A. Doty from 1918 who graduated from the state university medical department uses the term Iowa State. “He attended the Medical School of the Iowa State University in 1882.” (Iowa City Republican, March 21, 1918, p. 1)
To close, here is an event notice for the Iowa State Nurses Association that was to be led by Mary C. Haarer, Iowa State University Hospital, in 1919. Other common names of the hospital were State University Hospital and University Hospital. (Iowa City Republican, October 13, 1919, page 10)
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After many decades of use, the term Iowa State began to decline for the university in Iowa City after 1930. By this point, the Engineering Department was using the term University of Iowa, where they had previously used State University of Iowa. Around 1957, James Hilton who was president of the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, requested a name change for his institution to Iowa State University. The Iowa Board of Regents voted to request the state legislature change the name to Iowa State University of Science and Technology in an executive session on April 10, 1859 (Board minutes, page 357). This change became effective on July 4 that year (Acts of the 1959 Regular General Assembly, Chapter 74, p. 102).
This was not quite the end of the story, though. Five years later, University of Iowa President Howard Bowen went to the Board of Regents with his own naming proposal. Bowen stated that with two universities using Iowa, State, and University in their titles, there was even more confusion than before the 1959 elevation of Iowa State to a university. He advocated for permission to change the name in common use, but to leave the official title as the State University of Iowa (Board minutes, October 21–24, pp 170–171). This avoided a lengthy process in the state legislature and ceded no previous title to the state university. Although the Engineering Department at the University of Iowa had long sought separation from Ames, which appears to have started an engineering program a few years prior to Iowa’s civil engineering program. The engineering program at the University of Iowa appears to have used State University of Iowa before being an early adopter of University of Iowa by 1898, which likely was a way to clarify the program was in Iowa City rather than Ames. (The Transit, Volume 6). The official recognition of confusion between the programs at the State University and the State College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts only first appears in the Board of Regents minutes in early 1957 when the use of State University began to be modified first with the title State University in Iowa City and then completely changed to use of the more formal State University of Iowa. Prior to this, the common terms to refer to institutions in Iowa City and Ames were the State University and the Iowa State College (Board minutes, compare February and March, 1957 and January, 1956).
The current codified version of the state constitution, which is the 1857 constitution with amendments, simply notes that Section 11 of the state constitution, which establishes the state university at one place without branches, “may have been superseded or may be obsolete.”
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Editorial Note: This general topic has been covered before in the article, “What’s In a Name,” by former UI Archivist David McCartney in the Old Gold essay series. I am indebted to him for that. I have had the luxury of online digital resources and spare time to expand upon that work.
Sources: Where not otherwise linked, I used holdings of the University of Iowa Special Collections including the Iowa Digital Library, Daily Iowan Archive, and histories. Other references include the Historical Iowa City Newspapers collection at the Iowa City Public Library, the Library of Congress map collection and Chronicling America newspaper collection, The anonymous 1883 History of Johnson County, Iowa and the 1912, Leading Events in Johnson County, Iowa History, volume 1. Outside of this post, at least one additional image of Professor Gustavus Hinrichs’ Laboratory class in 1874 appears in John Gerber, A Pictorial History of the University of Iowa, 1988 published by the University of Iowa Press. Other images or references are very likely to be found in the University Archives and various sources, such as newspapers and state publications.
On Diverse Arts and Sciences 