2 THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Our knowledge of the character of the men, and the official report of what they did, is all we have to reveal the spirit in which they set themselves to their task.
Of the nineteen members of the Board at that time eleven were present at this first session, which lasted three days. Included among the number, as ex-officio members, were the boy Governor of the State, Stevens T. Mason, then only twenty-five years old, the Lieutenant-Governor, Edward Mundy, and the Chancellor of the State, Elon Farnsworth; while among the members by appointment were Michigan's first Congressman and author of the law under which the University was to be organized, General Isaac E. Crary, and two well-known Detroit physicians, Dr. Zina Pitcher, afterward to be known as the founder of the Medical School, and Dr. Samuel Denton, destined to be a professor in the same Department.
Their first action was the appointment of a committee to select the forty acres offered as an inducement to bring the University to Ann Arbor. Measures were then taken for the organization of the institution; the Legislature was petitioned to give the Board the power to appoint a Chancellor; four professorships were established until more were needed; salaries were limited to not less than $1,200 or more than $2,000; and a Librarian was appointed for a library not yet in existence.
Thus the University began its career. The men who were responsible for it in its early years were, for the most part, lawyers and politicians, lacking even the actual experience in educational matters which the clergymen of that time were supposed to have; but there is evidence of an idealism and confidence in the future on their part which must explain the eventual success of the University, a vision which enabled
