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How 26 Heifers Helped Move A College

Fresno State may not be the oldest college in the country or the state, but it has been one of the most mobile. The first move occurred in 1916, when the five-year old teachers college relocated from the Fresno High School campus to the buildings now occupied by Fresno City College. The second was in the 1950’s when the growing institution, then called Fresno State College, moved from that site to its present (and presumably final) location at Cedar and Shaw. 

The story of the move that commenced fifty years ago deserves to be remembered now, because it is an important part of the larger story of the San Joaquin Valley.  Also, the move illuminates how a few visionary citizens and professors with a specific goal of improving agricultural education garnered the vast resources of the state to build an institution that continues to have a profound, and in some ways, immeasurable effect on the region. 

The origin of the move can be traced to1940, when some area dairymen who were interested in agricultural education donated 26 heifers to the Fresno State College Agricultural Club.  They could not have imagined how their gift would ultimately change the college, the region, and the agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley.

The gift prompted Fresno State President Frank W. Thomas to ask the Board of Governors of the Fresno State College Foundation in 1941 to consider ways to purchase land because, “Any program of practical agricultural education requires a college farm upon which permanent developments may be established.”  The attack on Pearl Harbor four days afterward distracted the Board of Governors from their search for “housing facilities for livestock.”

Some persistent farmers and businessmen from Fresno and the five neighboring counties, however, did not let the war deter them from pursuing their dream of establishing an agricultural college in Fresno.  On June 24, 1942, the Fresno State College Foundation and a voluntary citizens group called the Six Counties Agricultural Advisory Committee signed an agreement for the “Acquisition and Operation of a Farm for the Fresno State College.”

The agreement stated, “Projects to be pursued on this farm will be confined to the training of students in farm operation, farm mechanics, and farm management, as these exist in the San Joaquin Valley.  The purpose is to teach the students to learn by doing.  The practical experience will be supplanted with present and future courses of instruction in Agriculture at Fresno State College which are necessary to provide competent training.”   

According to President Arnold Joyal’s History of the California State University, Fresno Foundation, the citizens group was initially chaired by J.E. O’Neill, and had a rather fluid composition during the years of its existence.  It included prominent business and agriculture leaders such as Russell Giffen, Al Brown, Lloyd Harnish, A. Setrakian, O.B. Stockdale, Dudley Carlsen, Harry S. Baker, Paul R. Bartlett, H.H. Courtright, Tennis Erickson, T.L. Harper, Eugene Hayes, Gilbert Jertberg, F.J. McCarthy, H. Gregory McKeever, Joseph A. Quinn, J.E. Rodman, Louis Slater, B.B. Turner, Elmer VonGlahn, Harry F. White, and Leland Martin.  

Additional influential committee members were Joseph Cardwell, Al Funch, Lester Frick, Lloyd Frick, Gilbert Jertberg, James Mayer, A.J. Quist, Al Radka, and Jess Rodman.  Others who actively supported the establishment of an agricultural college included J.B. Cella, George Cosgrove, Louis Gundelfinger, Chris Jorgensen, Frank Diener, Ben Epstein, William Hansen, M.B. Harris, C.L. Kincheloe, Guy Leonard, A.V. Lisenby, J.F. Niswander, George Osborn, George Sharp, and Art Stiendorf. The committee was advised by Fresno State College’s first full-time agriculture instructor, O. Martin Braun. 

They pledged to raise money to purchase a suitable farm “lying within ten miles of Fresno State College.”  It is important to note that no one, not the committee nor college administrators nor the state had any plan at this time to move the academic campus of the college which was then located at the intersection of Van Ness and McKinley Avenues.  Everyone assumed that the academic campus could expand when necessary on land contiguous to the campus.

Before the end of the war, the committee had pledged to raise $500,000.  And more livestock kept arriving, including a $50,000 herd of registered Hereford breeding cows and a prize sire.  By 1948, thanks to legislation introduced by State Senator Hugh M. Burns of Fresno, a state college agricultural school fund was filling up with money derived from horse racetrack fees.

The University of California fought hard to prevent the establishment of an agricultural school at Fresno State College, claiming that it would duplicate offerings at Davis and also at Cal Poly.  But local ag boosters as well as the Fresno Bee successfully argued that: the focus of the school would be on practice rather than research; the six counties combined constituted a larger agricultural area than that of Arizona, Nevada, and Utah; and the San Joaquin Valley presented unique agricultural conditions.  Furthermore, they didn’t want to send their children to Davis or San Luis Obispo to learn to farm.  By the end of World War II, the ag boosters emphasized that the war had proved that on-the-job training works and that an agricultural school in Fresno could help prevent a relapse of the Great Depression.

Agricultural committee chairman J.E. O’Neill pointed out that an agricultural school fit within the original mission of Fresno State College:  “When the Fresno Normal School was established in 1911 the act required that agricultural education must always be given at the school.  This work has been carried on continuously and for the last ten years there have been three instructors in the department of agriculture at Fresno State College.  The great weakness of the program has been that the students had no opportunity to engage directly in the practical activities of the farm and the instruction consequently was limited to the bookish type.  We propose to acquire a 320 acre farm to be operated in conjunction with agricultural teaching at Fresno State College.”  (This dual emphasis on agricultural education and more general teacher training perhaps explains why so many photographs from the college’s early years depict young women with hoes and rakes.)        

The committee worked at both the state and local levels to establish an agricultural college.  By 1948, the citizens committee had acquired farmland in two places: 440 acres at Hammer Field (near the present FYI Airport), and 360 acres near Bullard and Chestnut, which was at that time remote from Fresno.  Unfortunately, a government study later showed the Hammer Field land to be “infested with noxious weeds and so sandy it will require more than ordinary irrigation.”

In November 1949, the State of California, recognizing that postwar enrollment projections at Fresno State College necessitated far more campus space than was available at the McKinley and Van Ness site, bought land for a new academic campus at Blackstone and Shields.  The state government drew up building plans and was about to break ground when a huge brouhaha broke out in the community because the State of California insisted that the proposed agricultural school be adjoined and integrated with the new academic campus.  State officials argued that separate campuses for agriculture and for other academic departments would incur unnecessary expenses. 

Eighty faculty members who, anticipating rising land costs in the vicinity of the new academic campus, had bought home sites early, now found themselves anticipating barnyard smells.   Some of them feared losing their home sites to the farm school.  City planning commissioners thought that a farm school near Blackstone and Shields would “blight development of the community to the north.”  City councilmen complained that the city would have to provide services to the farm school but not receive revenue because the state would own the land.  Some real estate developers hoped to build a shopping center on the site of the proposed new campus.  And post war land prices were rising rapidly in the area where land for the farm school needed to be acquired. 

With lightning speed almost unknown in government today, all interested parties met in Sacramento in late December, 1949, where they agreed to build the academic campus and the agricultural school on eight parcels of farmland at Cedar and Shaw.  The Six Counties Agricultural Advisory Committee’s 1946 purchase of the farm acreage at Bullard and Chestnut, then, was the catalyst for what President Joyal called, “an entirely new plan.”  Ground was broken for the new campus 50 years ago this past October 17.  Eight years and $30 million dollars later, in May 1958, the new campus was dedicated. 

Beginning in 1953, when the first buildings on the new campus were completed, college administrators had to arrange up to fifty bus trips a day to shuttle students between an outgrown campus and an unfinished new one five miles away.       

President Joyal complained that neither he nor anyone else in Fresno had any input into the design of the new buildings.  The State of California’s Division of Architecture “was very hard to work with.  They just designed a building and maybe it looked like the rest and maybe it didn’t.”  Not until the 1960s were Cal State campuses allowed to choose architects in the private sector. 

The Lab School was the first building to go up on the new site, perhaps symbolic of the original mission of the institution, which was to train teachers.  It ceased to be a working lab school in the early 1970s, when state funding was cut for lab schools and when universities across the nation closed laboratory schools because schools of education wanted student teachers to have “real world” experience in “real schools.”  Ironically, in this anniversary year, the university has become home to a 21^st century version of a lab school: University High School.  This college preparatory charter school is located just a few feet from the lab school.

By 1958, the heifers and their descendants had a home, the showcase agricultural school could both lead and serve the six - county region, the academic programs were on their way toward achieving university status, and the City of Fresno had a new direction for expansion.  And all this happened because some citizens had a vision and were generous enough with their time and money (and livestock) to give form to that vision.