Class members included Rosa Jacobs (front row center), John B. Elgin (front row right), James K. Weatherford (top row right), Thomas C. Alexander, and Alonzo J. Locke.
Burkhart was a member of the Corvallis College Class of 1871 and was from Lebanon, Oregon. He was elected as the Alumni Association’s first vice president after its founding in early 1873. He also served on the college’s board of trustees in 1887 and 1888.
All four of these Corvallis young women attended Corvallis College as preparatory students between 1866 and 1868. Rose Russell married Lewis F. Wilson in 1869; their son, Eddy, graduated from the college in 1889 and was a longtime member of the board of regents.
Sarah Finley was the daughter of a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Despite health concerns that precipitated the Finleys’ return to California in 1872, she lived to be 89 years old, passing away in 1937. Finley was a leader of the suffrage movement in Sonoma County, California. Thomas Houseworth & Co. was one of the leading photography studios in San Francisco in the 1870s and 1880s.
Corvallis College as it appeared in about 1868. It was located in the center of the block bounded by Fifth, Sixth, Madison, and Monroe Streets in Corvallis, Oregon.
Benjamin Lea Arnold was named the second president of Corvallis College in the summer of 1872 by the bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, and he arrived in Corvallis that September. During Arnold's twenty-year presidency, one of his greatest achievements was starting the State Agricultural Association with the intent to construct a suitable building for school purposes.
George Wilcox Peavy, Dean of Forestry, was appointed acting president of Oregon State College in 1932 when William J. Kerr was chosen as the first chancellor of the Oregon State System of Higher Education. Peavy became Oregon State College's seventh president in 1934, the first OSC faculty member to also serve as president of the institution. He remained dean of forestry during his presidency until his retirement in 1940, upon which he was appointed as dean emeritus and president emeritus of OSC.