Henry Mall Historic District

About this property

The Henry Mall Historic District is a landscaped mall and the surrounding academic agriculture buildings on the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus, roughly laid out by architects Warren Laird and Paul Cret from 1906 to 1908, with buildings constructed from 1903 to 1961. In 1992 the district was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The University of Wisconsin was created on paper in 1848, the same year that Wisconsin became a state. In 1850, before any building, a UW architect envisioned a mall running down the hill that would later be called Bascom Hill. The UW's oldest building, North Hall was built in 1851 near the top of that mall, and for fifty years most of the UW's construction was along the Bascom Hill mall. The UW curriculum initially focused on geography, English grammar, Latin and Greek. Chancellor Lathrop endorsed agricultural education already in 1851, but the state legislature didn't fund it. In 1857 Michigan did start a college of agriculture, and Iowa followed in 1858. After the Morrill Act of 1862 opened the possibility of land-grant funding, the legislature in 1866 expanded the UW's charge to include industrial and agricultural education and created a professorship of agriculture and chemistry. The Regents bought a 195-acre farm on what was then the west side of campus, where "agriculture is to be practically taught by experimenting on different soils and location of the land..." (That farm on the west end of campus is now very citified - the site of many of the UW's ag buildings.) A school of agriculture was established in 1868 with a three-year degree, but the courses were mostly general science courses, and students were few. Finally in 1880 a professorship was created devoted solely to agriculture, and William A. Henry was appointed. "A man of great energy, a vigorous correspondent, an active and effective publicist, Henry worked closely with the farm leaders of Wisconsin and the farmer's associations, seeking to find out what the farmers wanted from the department and trying to devise the means of giving it to them." Henry procured the first grant from the legislature to study a new agricultural venture - the cultivation of various kinds of sugar cane and manufacture of syrup and sugar from it. He got another grant to fund the university farm, which was renamed the Experiment Station. Under Henry's guidance, the UW began offering two-day farmer's institutes, which discussed the best agricultural practices with farmers, and in 1886 started the 12-week winter short course for farmers - a new idea that hadn't been tried elsewhere. More practical research was done by the Ag department, including exploration of round silos, barn ventilation, soil problems, use of insecticides, development of plum varieties for Wisconsin's climate, the effects of different feeds (including the new silage) on animal growth and milk production, Professor Stephen Babcock's standardized butterfat test, a better understanding of how cheese can be made, and testing for bovine tuberculosis.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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