Ezra Cornell and The Pines Lands of Northern Wisconsin
I’ve recently been reading an array of books and articles on northern Wisconsin history, and a few days back, I picked up a book on Ezra Cornell, the founder of Cornell University in New York, entitled The Wisconsin Pine Lands of Cornell University. You may rightfully ask, what does an Ivy League college have to do with northern Wisconsin? Well, Ezra Cornell founded Cornell University via his purchase and sale of nearly a half-million acres of pine lands in northern Wisconsin in the later 1800s.
It’s a complicated but fascinating story. Upon the forced signing of treaties with the many Native American tribes in Wisconsin in 1825, 1835, 1836, 1837, 1839, 1842, 1848, 1854, and 1856, the Federal Government now had at its disposal tens of millions of acres in Wisconsin to grant or to sell. The General Land Office, established in 1812, was given the authority to oversee surveying and disposing of all these Indian lands throughout the country. It’s a sordid history of corruption and theft, far too long to tell here, but many laws were passed to facilitate settlement over those years including the Homestead Act of 1862.
Also in 1862 in the midst of the Civil War, the Morrill Act was passed by Congress, creating land-grant colleges in each U.S. state that would teach agriculture and the mechanical arts (engineering). This would seem positive, but to fund the colleges, each eligible state was given 30,000 acres of federal land for each member of Congress the state had as of 1860. Proceeds from the sale of this land were then to be used to establish and fund the colleges.
Here’s the kicker. If there was not enough federal land within a state to meet that state's land-grant allocation, the state was issued scrip – essentially paper vouchers – that authorized the state to select and sell available lands in other states to fund its own land-grant college in its home state.
At that time, New York had no federal lands left and was also the most populous state in the country with 33 members in Congress. Multiply the 30,000 acres per each member of Congress times New York’s 33 members, and New York became the single largest beneficiary of the Morrill Act, ultimately expropriating over 990,000 acres (more than 1,500 square miles) in 15 different states (these lands came from over 230 different Indigenous tribes), with most acreage coming from Wisconsin and California.
States, however, were prohibited from owning land within another state. So, most often, the state offered the scrip for sale, a process usually resulting in wealthy speculators buying the scrip for a very low cost per acre, then raising the price per acre, and selling the land for a generous profit.
Enter Ezra Cornell who had offered his farmland in Ithaca, New York, as a site for the land-grant college, as well as $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment for the college. He also made the state an additional very generous offer. He would buy all the scrip from the state, purchase lands wherever he could find the best deals, and manage them until they could be sold at the best profits, all of which he agreed to donate to the establishment of Cornell University.
The state agreed, and he purchased New York’s scrip at its fair market value, in this case 50 cents per acre for the first 100,000 acres in 1865, and then 60 cents per acre in 1866.
To then secure the best lands to sell, Cornell sent Henry Putnam to Wisconsin, a shrewd land dealer who knew the pine lands of northern Wisconsin very well, and who also had complete control of the Eau Claire land office where all scrip entries in the Chippewa Valley had to be made, and where no rival could secure land that Putnam wanted.
Wisconsin’s population was 305,000 in 1850, but by 1860, another 470,000 settlers had arrived, so land was being gobbled up by in-state and out-of-state speculators and sold at as high of a price as they could get from the swarm of settlers.
By 1865, Wisconsin’s public domain had been reduced to ten or eleven million acres, but many of the best stands of pine in northern Wisconsin were still in public hands.
To make what is a very long story very short, Cornell acquired a half-million acres (497,126 to be exact) of pine land and farmland in Wisconsin by 1867, and refrained from selling the land for decades to allow it to appreciate in value.
When the books were closed on most of the sales by the early 1900s, the land and trees added more than $5 million to the university's endowment fund. Five million dollars in 1900 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $180 million today.
While most other states had sold their federal land allocation immediately for as little as 42 cents an acre, the peak price paid for Cornell’s pines reached $82 an acre. Some have described this as the most successful land speculation deal in U.S. history.
Across the country, 52 colleges benefited from the Morrill Act, schools like Penn State, Texas A&M, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin.
So, I was curious: Did Cornell own and then sell any of the land near where I live in Manitowish?
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| Cornell's purchase of a quarter section a few miles from our house in Manitowish |
I live in the Township of Sherman, T.42N.-R.4E. Consulting historic records from the General Land Office, I found the legal patents to 11 quarter sections (160 acres each) in this Township, totaling 1,760 acres, that Cornell purchased on May 2, 1870. This land is just a couple miles east and south on Hwy. 51 near where a state wayside is today along the Manitowish River (see the attached copy of one of the legal patents as well as a summary of Cornell’s purchases).
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| Cornell's purchases |
Today, Cornell University still owns the mineral rights to much of the land Cornell purchased in Wisconsin. If you’d like to see the total extent of Cornell’s lands, see the Wisconsin Historical Society’s digitized map at https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM77162.
How Do The First Fish Find Their Way Into A Lake?
It’s already been a long, albeit warm winter, and in such a time, my mind sometimes wanders onto strange topics. Thus, the question of how fish ever got into all of our lakes has resurfaced. It’s a question I’ve been asked on occasion, and to which I’ve basically shrugged my shoulders and said, “Possibly a heron or eagle or osprey dropped a fish on the way to its nest, or maybe fish eggs got stuck on their feathers.” But basically, I’ve never known.
Now I have a better answer. In a 2020 article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Lovas-Kiss, et al. “Experimental evidence of dispersal of invasive cyprinid eggs inside migratory waterfowl”), Hungarian researchers fed 500 live eggs of two species of carp to eight captive mallards, and watched to see whether any of those eggs came out the other end and survived in the water. Six of the ducks pooped out 18 intact eggs, and three of the recovered eggs hatched into baby carps, suggesting that mallards, and likely other waterfowl, ferry fish eggs between waterbodies near and far.
Three eggs may seem a pittance, but mallards are ubiquitous across North America, Asia, and Europe, sharing their ponds, marshes, and lake edges with spawning carp. A single common carp lays up to 1.5 million small, sticky eggs every time it spawns, and it can spawn multiple times per season. Lead author Ádám Lovas-Kiss writes, “If mallards find these spawning areas, they will go there and eat the eggs until they can’t move. It’s a great resource for protein for them.”
The researchers are now looking to repeat the experiment with eggs of several other fish species to see if they survive the mallard’s gut and successfully hatch and develop. If they do, the question of where fish come from that live in our lakes may well be solved.
Reading Scat
A friend recently emailed me with a question regarding some scat she found on her property that was fresh, full of hair, and rather large. She wondered if I could tell if it was either a coyote or a wolf.
Well, it’s tricky. One of the best books on tracking, and also on identifying scat, is by James Halfpenny: A Field Guide to Animal Tracking in North America. Halfpenny, a well-known leader in the art/science of tracking and identifying animals, stresses the need for other supporting clues in addition to scat, like tracks. “Experience has shown that visual identification of scat without additional clues may be correct only 50 to 66% of the time,” he says.
He adds, “To illustrate size variation, I have assembled information from three studies on the diameters of canine feces. The size distributions were derived from 1,440 positively identified scats as follows: 95 gray fox, 129 red fox, 926 coyote, and 290 wolf. All four species produce scats in the range of 13 to 20 mm. No single diameter will positively separate these species. Any single diameter used as a criterion to separate two species will misidentify a certain percentage of the scat.”
I don’t know many folks who carry a millimeter ruler/tape around with them to measure the diameter of scat, but if you are so inclined, Halfpenny notes that scat less than 18mm is fox 90% of the time; scat between 18 and 25 mm is coyote about 63% of the time, and scat 25 mm or larger is wolf also about 63% of the time.
There you have it, more than you ever wanted to know, and the real scoop on poop.
Ice-Out on the Manitowish and Bees Flying
The Manitowish River reopened up below our house on Jan. 30, and remains open as of this writing on 2/9. It iced over on Jan. 15, making this a two-week ice season, at least so far, on the river.
Temperatures nearly reached 50°F on 2/8, and the honey bees in our two hives were flying! Honey bees usually won’t forage until 55°F, but with sunlight on the hives, they are known to fly at 45-50°F. Temperature within the hives is kept at 95° by the bees constantly shivering and flapping their wings within a large cluster. The worker bees in the center of the cluster actively generate heat while those on the outside of the cluster rest and form an insulating layer. The resting bees can also visit a cell of their own capped honey and fill their crop.
The bees in the center of the cluster will eventually need to rest. too. They will make their way out to the periphery, and the outside bees eventually move inward, where they warm up and begin to take another shift as active heaters. All winter long, workers move in and out of the cluster, taking turns.
January Temps
In Wisconsin, the state-wide average temperature of 23.0 degrees was 7.7 degrees higher than the long-term average (1895 to present). This anomaly put the month as the 5th warmest January on record. The daily minimum temperatures were even more extreme: 2nd warmest in the 129 years of data. All parts of the state were exceptionally warm, ranging from 8 to 11 degrees above normal, but far north-central and northeast Wisconsin had the largest anomalies of all.
Besides the extreme warmth, the most remarkable aspect of January was the seemingly relentless cloudiness. Based on daily sky conditions (sunrise to sunset) reported by the National Weather Service, all six major weather stations around Wisconsin reported at least 70% sky cover in January, exceeding average conditions by 15 to 25 percentage points. Milwaukee suffered through clouds 88% of the time while Madison was nearly as high (86.5%)
Worldwide, last month was the hottest January ever recorded, both on land and at sea. Whether it was the dreariest, I don’t know.
Thought for the Week
“It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.” – C. W. Leadbeater
Please share your outdoor sightings and thoughts: e-mail me at manitowish@centurytel.net, call 715-476-2828, snail-mail at 4245N State Highway 47, Mercer, WI, or see my blog at www.manitowishriver.blogspot.com
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