Wow! Had no idea about Cornell acquiring land under the Morrill Act in WI and selling it later.
“ Given the manner in which the Morrill Act linked the distribution of formerly-Indigenous public lands held by the federal government to Congressional representation (30,000 acres were allocated to each state based on the number of representatives and senators seated in Congress), New York’s land-grant college was bound to have an outsized role in the legislation’s subsequent history. Then the most populous state in the Civil War-truncated Union, New York received nearly ten percent of the land allotted by the Morrill Act: 989,920 acres of the 10,929,215 acres that actually passed to the states.[9] Under the terms of the Morrill Act, states with federally-controlled public lands within their boundaries could claim particular tracts and eventually sell them for the benefit of their prospective land-grant college(s). Eastern states with no available public lands at that time, such as New York, received what was referred to as “land scrip” (paper certificates). Each piece of land scrip entitled the bearer to select, locate, and enter (i.e., claim) a quarter-section (160 acres) of unappropriated public land subject to sale by private entry (i.e., land that had gone unsold at a prior public auction) anywhere in the United States. Because the Morrill Act explicitly barred one state from taking direct ownership of land in another state, the expectation at the time was that eastern states would sell their scrip allocations to individuals (“assignees”) and then invest the proceeds in “safe” stocks or bonds yielding a minimum of five percent interest annually.”
