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.
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.
This image shows some of the preparatory and college level students enrolled at the time. The 1872-73 college catalog lists ninety-eight students at all levels, including twenty-six “agricultural students.”
William Asa Finley served as the first president of Corvallis College from 1865 to 1872. He was appointed as president in 1865 by the Methodist Episcopal Church South and was president at the time the college was chosen as the agricultural college for Oregon under the provisions of the 1862 Morrill Act.
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.
