“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum, like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries, chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit—not a fossil earth, but a living earth.”
—Walden, Henry David Thoreau, 1854

It is a true marvel and the deepest of mysteries that life is bound up in time, and time is bound up in life...that we measure our presence according to seasons, the same timepiece that chronicles the cycle of all animal and plant life. Birth and rebirth each spring; the adolescence of summer; the maturity and harvest of autumn; and the quiet, still dormancy of winter.

The University of Idaho College of Agriculture has traversed such a path 100 times, dating to its birth in 1901. America’s westward migration demanded a better understanding of the land, its characteristics, and its potential...how to prosper in harmony. Visitors became settlers. Settlers became students. They needed an instruction manual and found it in the form of education.

Gainford Mix, the son of a nurseryman and cabinetmaker, was a pioneer among students seeking new knowledge about agriculture. He entered preparatory school at the University of Idaho and became the College of Agriculture’s first graduate in 1901.
Since then, Idaho and agriculture have grown, hand-in-hand, enjoying the bounty of a generous earth through a century of seasons. Droughts and floods. Cultivation and harvest. Good economic times and bad. Old challenges and new discoveries.

“Golden Opportunities,” a special centennial edition of the college’s magazine Programs & People, is a window to the past and a door to the future. In personal vignettes it celebrates the milestones that students, educators, and citizens of Idaho have realized in the past century. It is by no means the definitive summary of the college’s history; volumes would be needed to contain such information. Instead, the magazine seeks to view portions of the journey—like pages in a family album—through the eyes of those who experienced it first-hand, from Clen and Emma Atchley in Idaho’s southeast corner to Barbara Arnold in the northern panhandle.

Today, we turn the corner on a new century, essentially following the same charge the college assumed at the dawn of the last century: “to teach—in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life” (Morrill Act, U.S. Congress, 1862). We carry that mission forward with a new name that better reflects the breadth and depth of our programs for all Idahoans. Effective July 1, 2001, the centenarian was re-christened The College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, an acknowledgment that our programs touch lives in every way possible.

Profiles on the following pages invite you to ponder our future. How will the collective wisdom of the preceding 100 years influence the next 100? What new discoveries lie ahead? How will they be applied? Join us as we write a new chapter in the history of the college and Idaho.
 

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