Ames College Railway’s route across campus to ensure that the passengers in the cars received the maximum visual impact of the model farm, stately academic buildings, and central campus. The Dinkey allowed Beardshear to move increasing numbers of students off campus to live in boarding houses and faculty to live in what they called “east Ames.” This eased the overcrowded conditions on campus and brought the city and college together as one community. Just as the Motor Line took students and townspeople to Ames and beyond, it brought the outside world to IAC. The college soon began to host regional and statewide conferences. The flow of students from campus into Ames to live, shop, and play brought a boom time to Ames throughout 1892. The existence of the Motor Line also allowed for the city to take the fateful step of annexing the land around the college into the city limits in 1892. This action on the part of the city had farreaching consequences. Annexation saw the city’s population rise to more than 2,000, which, in turn, allowed Ames to rise to the status of a “second class city.” The new status meant more resources from the state and county flowed into Ames, but annexation also brought an educated and affluent community of faculty and students into the ranks of Ames’ citizenry. It was not long before IAC faculty began to seek election to the Ames City Council, and it was also not long before groups of students came before the City Council with petitions seeking change. Over the 16 years of its existence from 1891 to 1907, the train carried more than 2.1 million passengers between Ames and Iowa State along with nearly all of the materials used to build the new structures that were added to campus in these years. But one of the most important aspects of the history of the Motor Line turns on the sentimentality that the little train produced in the minds of townspeople and students. The Ames newspapers made the Dinkey’s employees into local celebrities and chronicled great and small events on the Motor Line with enthusiasm. The Dinkey became such a part of the daily routine of the students in the 1890s that they,
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too, chronicled its daily life in the student newspaper. Students at IAC in these years considered the Dinkey as much a part of their college experience as classes, institutional food (which, not surprisingly, they hated), and exams. An irreparable loss Throughout the later 1890s as the nation’s economy recovered, ISC’s enrollment grew. By the turn of the century it had grown to nearly 1,000 students with no end in sight. In this brief time William Beardshear had accomplished much, but his vision for the future was bold and clear. He wanted to change ISC from a largely residential campus to one where the students lived off campus on its fringes or downtown. He wanted the older buildings that had housed both
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hat Iowa State College would have become in the next decade had William Beardshear lived is anyone’s guess.
students and academic units replaced with proper classroom buildings to accommodate the growing number of students attending ISC. He told the trustees in one of his annual reports in the late 1890s that the students who attended the “People’s College” should expect and receive the same level of education along with the services to support them as if they attended the University of Iowa. The burning of the north wing of The Main Building in December 1900 allowed the president to make a case to the legislature for a new central building to replace what was left of The Main. Not only was Beardshear’s planned building massive in size and stature, he estimated the cost to be a staggering $262,000. Outside of the Capitol building in Des Moines, no other public building to that point in the history of the state had cost that much money. What ISC would have become in the next decade had William Beardshear lived is anyone’s guess. The president
suffered a serious heart attack in March 1902 and endured increasing ill health for the next five months. His friends and colleagues watched over him until the end, which came early in the morning on Tuesday, Aug. 5, 1902. The Ames Intelligencer noted that, “In his death Ames and Iowa suffer an almost irreparable loss.” As William Beardshear wished, students carried his casket to its final resting place in the Iowa State cemetery. The newspapers of the time noted that the grand structures he had worked so tirelessly to build on his campus would stand as a lasting testimonial to Beardshear’s labors and memory. But it was in the decades immediately after his passing, through the lives of the students that he mentored, that his legacy was the strongest. Their devotion to Prexy’s memory was unquestioned. M. L. Merritt, the student speaker at commencement in 1904, gave a eulogy of the late president for his senior address, and when Central Hall was completed in 1906, both students and alumni called for it to be named after William Beardshear. Much like those who wished the football stadium to be named after Jack Trice in the 1970s, our predecessors at the turn of the last century had to wait to see their wishes fulfilled. Finally, in 1938, the Board of Regents yielded to the pressure and named the titanic structure after the man who had done so much to build it. Yet, William Beardshear’s greatest legacy does not lie in mortar and brick, or even in the lives of those he mentored who are now long gone, but rather in what he helped Iowa State become. His achievement of transforming a small, deeply divided agricultural school of little significance into the “People’s College,” teaching a broad curriculum, offering degrees on the same level as the University of Iowa, and of an institution with national and international standing cast a long shadow. It is with us yet. The son of an Iowa State geology professor, Douglas Biggs spent much of his youth exploring the campus and later earned both a B.A. and M.A. in history from ISU. He also holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Minnesota. Biggs is currently an associate professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Kearney.
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