On January 16, 1869, the university (then East Tennessee University) was designated as Tennessee’s “Land-Grant College,” under the Morrill Act of 1862. (When the act was signed into law by President Lincoln on July 2, 1862, Tennessee was part of the Confederacy, and the act expressly prohibited designating a college in a state “in a condition of rebellion or insurrection against the government of the United States.” Eventually, all 11 states that seceded were considered eligible, but Tennessee, readmitted to the United States on July 24, 1866, was first, being made eligible by a special Act of Congress that became law on February 28, 1867.) Tennessee accepted its grant on February 1, 1869.
The Morrill Act provided each state with thirty thousand acres of public land for each senator and each representative, or the equivalent in land scrip, to endow at least one college in each state to teach agriculture and the mechanical arts, as well as military tactics. Since there was no federal land in Tennessee, the university received scrip for three hundred thousand acres of public land, and the legislature delegated the authority to sell the scrip and invest the proceeds to a board composed of the governor, the secretary of state, and the comptroller.
In May 1868 this board proceeded to sell the entire amount of the state’s scrip to G. F. Lewis, a Cleveland, Ohio, broker. He finally, after a three-year period, paid Tennessee 90 5/8 cents per acre, or $271,875 in acreage. The money was invested in Tennessee state bonds and the delay allowed the state to take some advantage of the declining price of the bonds on the New York market. East Tennessee University finally received, during the period 1869–71, a total of $396,000 in Tennessee bonds, bearing 6 percent interest, as its endowment under the Morrill Act. The institution received $26,000 per year. The act prohibited the use of funds for purchase, maintenance, or repair of facilities but did allow expenditure of up to 10 percent of the funds to be used for purchase of lands for sites or experimental farms, if approved by the state legislature.
In 1913 Chapter 18 of the Acts of the Tennessee Legislature transferred the land-grant obligations and fund for education of Negroes to Tennessee Agricultural and Normal School (now Tennessee State University).
In 2006 Robert J. Wegener of McHenry, Illinois, donated an original bill of sale of some land sold to fund the university’s land-grant endowment.