 "If any man can be called the father of the college, Ezekiel W. Dimond is the man." Ezekiel Dimond was elected by the Board of Trustees to serve as the first professor of the College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts. He arrived in Hanover on August 1, 1868, bringing with him seven boxes of books, specimens and equipment - the entire physical property of a college that really existed only on paper. But Prof. Dimond was a man of unlimited vision and determination. From 1868 until his untimely death in 1876 at age forty, he taught the general and agricultural chemistry courses and also served as the business manager, recruiter, architect, supervisor of construction, farm manager, and lobbyist in the legislature. On his death, the trustees stated, "Without Dimond's zeal, faith, and personal labor on behalf of an enterprise that absorbed all his time and thought, it is believed by many that the College would today be a vagary of the mind, rather than an accomplished fact."  |
