Horace E. Stockbridge
Horace Stockbridge was the first, and youngest, president of North Dakota Agriculture College, which later became North Dakota State University
Stockbridge was born in 1857 in Hadley, Massachusetts. He attended the Massachusetts Agricultural College and Goettingen University in Germany. He returned to the United States as an associate professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Agricultural College before leaving to accept a position at the Imperial College of Agriculture and Engineering in Japan. Stockbridge left Japan in 1889 and came to the North Dakota Agricultural College in 1890 to serve as its first president, at the age of thirty-three. He resigned in 1893 and went to Florida State University where he was a professor of agriculture until 1906. Dr. Stockbridge died in 1930.
Stockbridge was elected president of NDAC in 1890, when he was only 33 years old. He was the one who picked the location of the college, appointed the teachers, oversaw the construction of buildings, and organized the experiment buildings. He designed College Hall, now known as Old Main, and came up with the idea of special short winter courses so that farmers could get the planting done, in subjects like agriculture, chemistry, and other related topics. He resigned from NDAC in 1893, because of political reasons, and then moved to Americus, Georgia. After he left NDAC, Stockbridge became a professor of agriculture at Florida Agriculture College in 1897. He was the agriculture editor and co-founder of the Southern Ruralist from 1906-1922, and in 1922 he started editing for the Southern Farmland and Dairy, which he continued to do until his retirement due to ill health. Horace Stockbridge died on October 30, 1930 in Atlanta, Georgia[10]. In 1957, a new men’s hall on NDAC’s campus was named Stockbridge Hall in honor of the first president of the college.