The Formative Years

The natural resources of Michigan were instrumental in the establishment of the Michigan State Normal School in 1848. The Board of Visitors of the University of Michigan passed a resolution calling for the funding of a State Normal School and other seminaries of learning as a branch of the University:

"...it is expedient that the Salt Spring Lands should be appropriated to the support of a State Normal School... and that we recommend that the Legislature take immediate measures to appropriate the Salt Spring Lands to the purpose above contemplated." (Isbell, 1968, p. 7). The lands discussed were granted by the U.S. Congress to Michigan on July 25,1838. Up to 12 salt springs together with six sections of adjoining land each, were granted to the State for its use. The resource could not be sold or leased for a period not to exceed ten years without consent of Congress. One of the first tasks of Douglass Houghton, Michigan's first State Geologist was to locate and identify the brine deposits of the lower peninsula. John Farmer's (1831) map had documented several salt exposures in the lower tier of counties and by 1840 Houghton had located half of those required to, fund the State Normal School.

After attempts to establish a school as a branch of the University of Michigan had failed (1848), an effort was successfully made to found an independent institution. On March 28, 1849, owing largely to the effort of Oliver Comstock, Chairman of the Committee on Education of the State House of Representatives, an Act established a State Normal School. A primary concern of the Act was that importance be accorded to the "art of teaching" and "how to teach." The school was opened to both male and female students, emphasizing instruction in all the "various branches that pertain to good education." The rural character of Michigan's population was reflected in the provision of instruction in mechanical arts, art of animal husbandry and agricultural chemistry.

As stipulated by the Act, ten sections of the Salt Spring lands, known as the Normal School Building lands, were set aside as a fund for facilities to include a building, equipment and books for the school (Putnam, 1899 p. 132). The Act also directed that 15 sections of Salt Spring lands be located and sold to help support the budget. By 1857, sales totaled $73,246 of which $8,096 had been expended for building purposes. Thus the abundant yet much needed natural resource, salt, which decades later was to become the basis of Michigan's chemical industry, was critical to the establishment of the sixth normal school in the U.S. and the first west of the Allegheny Mountains.