N.B. This chapter is under review at North Dakota History.

Chapter 1

History before Libby:

Horace B. Woodworth and the Study of History at the University of North Dakota

            While most scholars regard Orin G. Libby as the “Father of North Dakota History”, he was not the first man to teach history nor was he the first individual to hold the position of Professor of History at the University of North Dakota.  Horace B. Woodworth held these honors.  The former farmer from Southern part of Dakota Territory taught history as well as philosophy, math, and even astronomy at the University of North Dakota from its inception in 1885 to his retirement in 1904.  From 1902-1904 he held the rank of Professor of History at the University.  In contrast to Libby’s relatively well-established professional credentials, Woodworth held a more fluid and ambiguous position both within the discipline of history and at the university reflecting the important changes to both of these institutions at the turn of the century.  Consequently, the context for Woodworth’s appointment to the university and his career preserve important perspectives on the early years of higher education in state.

            Woodworth’s story intersects with the history of the University of North Dakota and the history of history as a recognized academic disciplines in the United States.  Woodworth’s migration from the Professor of Mathematics, Physics, and Astronomy to Professor of Moral and Mental Science to the Professor of History at the University of North Dakota was contemporaneous with the creation of the professional infrastructure of the historical discipline, most notably, the American Historical Association, which was intended among other things to establish the integrity of the discipline by developing a coherent set of professional standards.  The role of the American Historical Association and its founders, particularly Henry Baxter Adams, in transforming the discipline in the United States from the domain of dedicated and erudite amateurs and to credentialed professionals is relatively well known.[1]  The one factor that has not necessary been fully appreciated is that the transition from amateur historians to professionalized discipline was not simple a tug-of-war between a faction within and outside of the modern university.  In many cases, like at the University of North Dakota, the transition from so-called amateur history to professional history occurred within departments and even within the individual’s appointed to particular positions.  In this regard, Woodworth represents a kind of missing link between the soon to be bygone days of amateur historians and the professionalization of the discipline which Orin G. Libby’s arrival on campus marked. 

            Like many missing links, exploring Woodworth’s place in the evolution of the university and the discipline, however, has proven to be particularly difficult.  This is, in part, because of the lack of information on Woodworth himself – despite his central role in the history of the university – but also because of the dearth of sources on the universities formative years in general.[2]  Some fragments of information appear in the President’s annual reports to the board of trustees and the annual report of the Department of History to the President which either exist as freestanding documents or as embedded within the President’s Report to the Board of Trustees.  The minutes of the Board of Trustees’ meeting for the first two decades of the university contain odd references to Woodworth and his pursuits at the University.  Woodworth appears infrequently in the correspondence of Merrifield, Vernon Squires, Kennedy, and others.  Unfortunately these correspondences contain regrettably little information regarding the man himself, his influences, or the reasoning behind the policies, events, and decisions that affected his role at the university.  Later reminiscences offered by faculty members, the local press, and the Dakota Student, the University’s student newspaper, provide some additional background and color, but little true substance.  This general dearth of sources for the University’s early years, plagues the two best studies of the University history – Vernon P. and Duane Squires’s serialized history of the University published in the late 1920s and early 1930s and Louis Geiger’s more expansive later work.[3]  Without diminishing the difficulties associated with the fragmentary record, one can see the source limitations presented in the study as a byproduct of the very process of professionalization that this study seeks to examine.  The absence of comprehensive, bureaucratic records reflects, at least in part, the informality of life at the University in its first few decades where jotted notes, hastily composed reports, and impromptu visits provided structure for university affairs as much as carefully composed epistles and memoranda. 

            Despite these limitations, Woodworth’s career remains sufficiently significant to serve as the center piece of this study.  It will do this by both attempt to piece together Woodworth’s place within the transformations of the University in its first two decades and by comparing his experiences to the experiences of his peers at the University of North Dakota and, more frequently, at other institutions in the larger region.  The following chapter examines three particular elements of this transitional time.  First, it will consider how Woodworth’s position within the university shifted as the goals of the University changed.  Second, it will contextualize the relationship between Woodworth’s pedagogy and scholarship and the broader field of history.  Finally, it will consider the place of Woodworth in Grand Forks’ society and the memories of the students and faculty.

From Math, Physics, and Astronomy to History

From an institutional standpoint, Woodworth’s career path was not terribly unusual in his time.  Born in 1830, he grew up farming in rural Vermont and graduated from Dartmouth in 1854 at the age of 24.[4]  Upon graduation he continued to farm while serving as the principal of several New England boarding schools through the latter 1850s.  By 1861, he had earned a degree Hartford Theological Seminary and preached in Connecticut and New Hampshire.  His choice of careers, first in teaching and then in the ministry, was not unusual for Dartmouth College students in 1850s.[5]  His formative years there were spent in an institution steeped in the educational traditions of the 19^th century which saw the university primarily as a “paternal organization in which the president and the faculty watched over their congregation to insure their spiritual, moral, and intellectual progress.”[6]  There was, needless to say, little interested in peer-reviewed scholarship or academic achievement per se.  Less concerned with academic success, many Dartmouth students, especially the sons of farmers from rural New England, sought the skills credentials to succeed in changing economic and social conditions of the 19^th century, and as might be expected many of them moved west.  Woodworth followed this trend and left New England first to serve as the pastor in Congregational churches in Charles City and Decorah, Iowa for several years, before moving to Mt. Vernon in what is now South Dakota to farm in the early 1880s.[7]  In 1884 owing perhaps to his acquaintance with a member of the University of North Dakota’s Board of Regents, F. R. Fulton, whom he had known in Iowa, he was hired by the University, an institution that was scarcely a year old, as Professor of Mathematics, Physics, and Astronomy.[8] 

His appointment in this capacity may appear to be an odd beginning for a man who would come to inaugurate the Department of History, but it reflects the transformative era of higher education from which the University emerges.  Woodworth was hired by Henry Montgomery and Webster Merrifield in 1885 who had emerged from the tumultuous first years of the University of North Dakota which included the dismissal of the first University President, William Blackburn, as responsible for both preparing the curriculum and hiring sufficient faculty to teach it.  Merrifield’s had graduated from Yale College in 1878 during Noah Porter’s term as College President.  Porter held strong opinions favoring the maintenance of a conservative curriculum emphasizing Latin, Greek, and moral education.[9]  In the early 1880s, he becomes known for his rejection of the elective system emerging at Harvard and other progressive East Coast universities and the preservation of the most traditional aspects of the American college education.[10]  Merrifield’s background mated well with Montgomery’s conservative educational roots amidst the strong English influence present in Eastern Canada to produce a curriculum for the University of North Dakota that emphasized Classical education and values.[11]  It would have also sat well with the Board of Regents of the University, men like James Twamley, William T. Collins, and Charles E. Teel, who all held degrees earned from east coast colleges around the mid century.[12] 

Both Merrifield and Montgomery were certainly attuned to the debate over whether a practical or more traditional curriculum was appropriate.  The president of the University of Minnesota, William Folwell, had been ousted in 1884, in part, by trustees and faculty who favored more a traditional approach to university coursework.[13]  A year later, a similar scenario befell the University of North Dakota’s first president, William Blackburn, who had advocated a more practical and popular curriculum for the school.  While the exact circumstances surrounding his departure are not entirely clear, and may have also involved personal differences with members of the Board of Trustees, he was relieved of duty after serving but one year.  Merrifield and Montgomery served to fill the gap left by his departure and were responsible for putting together the core of men to implement their ambitious, if overly traditional, curriculum.  This group, which included Horace B. Woodworth, would be known as the first Merrifield faculty (to distinguish it from the faculty hired by Merrifield during his official term as President of the University from 1891-1909).  They hired along with Woodworth, John Macnie to be the Professor of English, French and German.  He also had strong “traditionalist” credentials with a B.A. from the University of Glasgow in Scotland and an honorary M.A. from Yale in 1874.[14]  Like Woodworth, he would be a fixture at the University for years to come. 

While it is difficult to assemble a complete picture of all those who were willing and available to teach at the University when Woodworth was hired, one candidate stands out and perhaps sheds light on the kind of men Merrifield and Montgomery sought for their new faculty.  In 1885, the applicant pool for Woodworth’s position did not appear particularly deep; he was one of two chosen from four applicants.[15]  Among his competition for the position was Elwood Mead from Lafayette, Indiana who had applied to be a Professor of Mathematics or History.  Elwood Mead gives his name to Lake Mead for his service as the head of the Bureau of Reclamation from 1924-1936 during which time the Hoover Dam was built.  Mead’s training, a Bachelor of Science from Purdue University, was hardly more suited to teaching history than Woodworth.  His degree, however, was from an unapologetically practical university in contrast to Woodworth’s background as a preacher and a teacher from Dartmouth College.

Interestingly enough, despite the interest of some qualified men, there was clear concern regarding the absence of a historian on the University faculty.  The first catalogue of the University in 1884-1885, for the Arts Course required history of Freshmen (Greece and Rome), Second Years (European and English History), and Third Years (Constitutional History of England and the United States), and it was offered as an elective for Seniors.[16]  In the early years of the University when there were few qualified students the lack of such required classes, especially for upper classmen, was less of a concern than the dearth of classes for first year students or students at the college preparatory level.  In 1885-1886 Macnie, the Professor of English, French and German taught Greek history and in 1886-1887 he taught Roman, Greek, and English History.  Woodworth taught some history in the preparatory department which in the early years of the University housed more students than the university department itself.  Montgomery and Merrifield, however, were aware that the lack of a fulltime professor of history was one of the principal needs of the young university. Montgomery opined in his second report to the board of Trustee’s in June of 1885: “But probably the greatest need of all is a fund for the employment of first class men to take charge of chairs in Metaphysics, History, the Physical Sciences, and Pedagogics.  By a draft on the energies of the Professor of Modern Languages instruction in History and Mental Science may be carried on for another year, but this cannot be continued longer.”[17] 

It is doubtful, however, that Montgomery and Merrifield recognized the need for a professional historian.  In fact, the first graduate program in history in the U.S. had begun less than a decade earlier under Henry Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.  It was only in 1884 with encouragement from Daniel Coit Gilman, President of Johns Hopkins, H. B. Adams and others such as Andrew D. White, President of Cornell, that Baxter, Jameson and others had founded the American Historical Association as part of a broader effort to establish the fixtures of a professional identity.[18]  Nevertheless, the creation of the AHA was not an immediate cornerstone of professional identity.  It was largely populated by amateur historians, a handful of foreign trained scholars, and some teachers of undergraduates, as graduate training in history was almost unheard of in the U.S; at late as 1984, in over 400 universities and colleges in the U.S. there were only 20 fulltime history teachers and less than 30 graduate students.[19]  Despite the dearth of individuals with professional credentials and the novelty of formal graduate education in the U.S., in February of 1884 – a year before Woodworth or Mead had applied – Merrifield received a letter from Edward W. Bemis, the principal of the Marcy Grammar School in Minneapolis asking whether the University would be interested in his services to teach history.  Bemis was an early graduate of the Johns Hopkins seminar in history and offered as references Adams and Gilman.[20]  There is no evidence that he received consideration for the position.  He goes on to teach economics at the University of Chicago from which he was famously dismissed in 1895 for criticizing the Rockefeller gas monopoly.[21]

The policies of the University, however, began to change with arrival of Homer Sprague on campus in 1887 who held markedly different attitudes toward the qualifications of its faculty.[22]  Sprague, while also Yale graduate differed considerable from Merrifield, was also well-connected and friendly with many of the important figures involved in the transformation of American University life in the latter years of the 19^th century.  He counted among his friends, Andrew D. White, who taught history at the University of Michigan and was an inaugural member of the American Historical Association, and from childhood Gilman, the President of Johns Hopkins responsible for hiring Henry Baxter Adams and a supporter of the AHA.[23]  Men like these supported the development of History as a discipline and its place within the academy, and clearly influenced Sprague’s idea of a university as “preparing the young to be valuable members of the body politic.”[24]  This “utility oriented” approach to university education was tied closely then in philosophy and institutional roots to the development of the professional standards.[25]  By 1888, Sprague had hired Ludovic Estes to replace Woodworth as the Professor of Mathematics, Physics, and Astronomy.  Estes held a Ph.D. in Physics from Michigan and worked hard to develop laboratory science at the university which was seen as a key contribution to a useful education. As a result of Estes hiring, Woodworth moved to Chair of Didactics, Mental, and Moral Science and Principal of the Normal Department.  By 1890, he would have as part of his responsibilities the requirement to teach history.[26]

This is the context, then, of Woodworth’s brief stop as the Chair of Didactics, Mental, and Moral Science and Principal of the Normal Department and his final arrival in 1890 as the chair of the Department of History.  The actual workings of this shift are clear.  Woodworth did not like the position as principal of the Normal Department, which was primarily responsible for teaching secondary school teachers in the state, and felt that it detracted from his lectures in History and Mental and Moral Science.  By 1890, Woodworth  asserted his hope that “the course in History may be more fully developed in the near future and that it may be giving the prominence which its importance demands,”[27] and he duly appeared as the Professor of Mental and Moral Science and History.  In this new position Woodworth begins to prepare a more complete and consistent offering of University level history courses – namely in 1890 offering a course to juniors on the constitutional history of England and course on the History of Civilization for students in the Letters Course (which required less math and had a stronger emphasis on literature). These classes were complemented by courses in logic, psychology, and the history of philosophy.  Woodworth’s brief statements on pedagogy or educational philosophy suggest the link between his classes in philosophy, psychology, and history; in his report for 1890 he explains that teaching psychology partially as a lecture and partially as a recitation was “to encourage habit of independent thinking and thorough investigation.”[28] It goes without saying that these habits of the mind fit within the character of Sprague’s conception of the University, even if the Woodworth lacked the professional status that graduate departments of history and organizations such as the AHA would come to imparted in their members.  His new title, on the other hand, reflected an awareness on the part of the administration that narrower, more professional disciplinary focuses were becoming the norm at institutions throughout the U.S.

By 1892, Sprague had resigned as president of the University and Merrifield succeeded him.  Merrifield’s attitudes toward the function of the university had changed markedly over the preceding years, something that he himself acknowledged.  According to Geiger, Merrifield characterized the Merrifield-Montgomery curriculum as “grotesque.”[29]  A good example of the transformation of Merrifield’s direction came in 1891 when Woodworth had suffered a prolonged illness which kept him from many of his normal teaching duties.  At the same time, the Principal of the Normal Department, George Hodge, moved to become the Director of the newly created Conservatory of Music established.  In response to these two events, Merrifield hired Willis M. West, the Superintendent of Faribault Schools, to serve as the Principal of the Normal School and Professor of History.  While not a product of the august east coast seminars in history, West held a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Minnesota.  His subsequent career trajectory, however, provides an interesting counterpoint to Woodworth’s.  West’s stayed at the University of North Dakota’s only briefly, and by the end of 1892, he returned to the University of Minnesota to take the place of Professor Harry Pratt Judson who had been hired away by the University of Chicago where he would ultimately come to be the head of the Department of Political Science as well as the President of the University.[30]  Judson was an important figure in the development of the study of history at the University of Minnesota.  He had encouraged the development of history as a matter of study at the Minnesota as well as “pedagogics,” serving with the title Professor of History and lecturer on Pedagogy there.[31]  West followed Judson’s lead in combining the study of history and pedagogy at the University of Minnesota for two decades and writing some of the most influential history textbooks in U.S. History.  The failure of the University of North Dakota to retain his services prompted Merrifield to note: “His resignation is great loss to the University and causes deep regret that the University is not in a position to pay such salaries to professors at least now who will not be tempted to similar institutions in surrounding states by the salaries there paid.  I fully believe it would be the soundest wisdom for the University to pay its professors $2500 a year and call no man to its professorship who are not worthy and would not be able to command an equivalent salary elsewhere.”

At the same time as the University of North Dakota and University of Minnesota were working to establish a faculty of history, other universities in the Midwest likewise sought to invest in creating departments in line with the developing professional standards.  In 1890, the University of Wisconsin hired a young Johns Hopkins Ph.D. candidate, Frederick Jackson Turner to replace his supervisor there, William Francis Allen who died in 1889 having taught history and ancient languages.  Allen like many of the faculty of his day did not have a Ph.D., but established credentials from Harvard and later from work at Berlin and Göttingen.  His scholarly production ranged from European history, to recorded Slave songs from the American South, to a significant contribution to G. Stanley Hall’s Methods of Teaching History.[32]  Allen, like Woodworth and Judson, had come of age prior to the professionalization of the discipline, but he, nevertheless, adapted and contributed to the changing standards of the day.  He began to teach history at the University of Wisconsin in the mid 1870s, and he believed himself to be among the first to make American History a requirement in 1879-1880.[33]   Turner, in contrast, was in the process of earning his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins under the tutelage of Adams and Richard T. Ely.[34]  His research interests would remain, to a certain extent, narrower than his predecessor at Wisconsin, but his teaching interests remained every bit as broad.  He reports to Adams in 1889 that he was teaching “French Revolution, Primitive Society, Dynastic and Territorial History of the Middle Ages, Constitutional History of the U.S., and a seminary in History of the Northwest.”[35]  With the arrival of Clarence Haskins, Turner’s classmate at Johns Hopkins in 1890, and Turner’s successful completion of his Ph.D. in the same year, the Department of History at Wisconsin had two historians with Turner serving as Professor of American History and Haskins as Professor of Institutional History.  At that time Turner taught American Constitutional History, American Colonial History, Nineteenth Century, and seminary, and Haskins taught English History, English Constitutional History, History of Institutions, Greek History, and seminary.  Turner and Haskins, both of whom held Ph.D.s and were to become prolific scholars, as well as Presidents of the AHA, were hired by the University of Wisconsin for $2000 a year.[36]  It would seem that Merrifield’s complaint about the low salaries of University of North Dakota faculty in the early 1890s was not entirely justified.[37]

Much like Woodworth, Allen, Judson and West carved their positions in the field of history out of a number of pre-existing disciplines and interests in the academy.  These scholars saw history as a discipline as having particularly close ties to long standing concerns within the academy ranging from pedagogy to ancient languages, to the more broadly construed moral and mental sciences.  This contrasts the next generation of scholars who establish their professional credentials in the seminars of Germany, Johns Hopkins and elsewhere which tended to focus on particular problems distinct to specific times and places in the past.  Despite these differences, it was the interaction between these two groups of scholars that ensured the discipline of history had a solid base in the modern academy. 

Woodworth: Teacher and Scholar

It would be easy based on credentials alone to emphasize the difference between a scholar like William F. Allen and his successor Frederick Jackson Turner or ultimately Horace B. Woodworth and his more august successor Orin G. Libby.  To do this, however, would be to overlook both the developments within the institutional structure of the university and the work of men like Woodworth and Allen at their respective institutions. A closer examination of Woodworth’s role in establishing both a curriculum and contributing to the scholarly discourse in the discipline of history will demonstrate that the professionalization of the discipline of history was not entirely externally stimulated.  Not only did Woodworth continuously revise his curriculum, but he also produced published works that showed both an awareness of larger scholarly trends and a commitment to pedagogy. 

The earliest offerings at the University in the field of history reflected late 19^th century interests in institutional and constitutional history epitomized in the work of Adam’s seminar at Johns Hopkins and concomitant with an understanding of historical study as a way to ensure good and conscientious citizenship.[38]  In 1886-1887, Woodworth offered classes in the Constitutional History of England and the Constitutional History of the United States using the then recently-translated Hermann von Holst’s, The Constitutional and Political History of the United States, as the textbook.[39]  Adams and others of the burgeoning professionalization movement greatly admired Von Holst’s work for its “most impartial and scientific treatment.”[40]  While it is impossible to know what, exactly, Woodworth taught in his classes, it is worth noting that works like von Holst’s, while carrying on the standard Whig interpretations of history reflected the modern state of scholarship in the discipline.  Ten years later in the Catalogue of 1895-1896, Woodworth showed professional development in his use of course material.  While he still relied on the Israel Ward Andrews’ rather outdated textbook Manual of the Constitution of the United States  and assigned the work of the amateur historian George Ticknor Curtis,[41] these works are listed alongside it not only the work of von Holst as well as the works of and the professional practitioner Woodrow Wilson.^[42]  It is from the latter, more professionalized branches of this intellectual tree that O. G. Libby would spring with his early works on Constitutional History.[43] 

It is well known that the professionalization project in the discipline of history was as rooted in a particular method – most notably the seminar and the emphasis on the careful reading of actual documents, but it was not detached from a topical element.  In G. Stanley Hall’s much cited, Methods of Teaching History, Adams recommends not only the study and writing of local history, but of a kind that seeks to establish “the constitutional basis of local self-government in church and state.” Along these lines he commends the work of J. Macy at Iowa College (later Grinnell College) is “one of the most active pioneers in teaching ‘the real homely facts of government’ and who in 1881 published a little tract in Civil Government in Iowa.”[44]  Macy’s tract, published by Adams series, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, includes a rather detailed discussion of the development of the Iowa constitution.[45]  While Macy’s work may have been of a finer quality with a greater emphasis on contextualizing narrative and the preservation and reconstruction of the affairs of the earliest settlers in Iowa, it is not fundamentally dissimilar from Woodworth’s relatively modest scholarly effort, The Government of the People of the State of North Dakota.  Eldredge and Brother, a textbook publisher in Philadelphia, published the work both separately as well as bundled with Newton Thorpe’s The Government of the Nation: A Course in Civil Government based on the Government of the United States.[46]  In the preface, Woodworth notes: “the new interest in the study of Civics is a hopeful sign.  But the study ought not to be confined the study of the Constitution of the United States.  Home government in the township, in the county, and in the State has more to do than the national government, in matters connected with the home, family, and daily life of the citizen.”[47]  It begins with a twenty page history of the state before a chapter detailing the basic narrative of the states founding.  The bulk of its pages, however, are committed to a detailed analysis – almost of an exegetical nature – of the content, institutional apparatus, and, in some cases, reasoning behind the text of the constitution.  Perhaps it is more useful to contrast Woodworth’s book with that of the former President of the University, William Blackburn’s which details the history of the territory and early statehood of the Dakotas.  Blackburn’s work apparently written during 1892 and published 1902 with revised notes and forward in De Lorme W. Robinson, is highly fragmentary and primarily anecdotal in nature.[48]  It lacks the bent toward institutional history characteristic of the professionalization of history in the latter years of the 19^th century as well as the emphasis on primary sources (in Woodworth’s case this involved including the complete text of the Constitution).  One can, of course, object to this comparison as involving two different genres but during a period when the genre of history itself was just beginning to be formalized, but the comparison nevertheless would seem to place Woodworth more firmly in the evolving, professionalized school emphasizing institutional and Constitutional history than in the less formal school of historical writing manifest in Blackburn’s work.  Woodworth’s book is only surpassed in 1910 when James E. Boyle wrote The Government of North Dakota.[49] 

A greater affirmation of Woodworth’s understanding of the professional discourse perhaps emerges in the curriculum that he established over his long career which remained relatively stable even after his retirement and Libby’s arrival and promotion.  Both shared an interest in institutional and Constitutional history, and it is unsurprising that the core courses – those of U.S. and English History persisted well into the 20^th century as Course 1 in the catalogue of history.  Even after the myriad changes that shaped the modern university – the emergence of the pure elective system, the move to semesters, the slow growth of the faculty available to the Department of History – there remained an emphasis on institutional and Constitutional history.  This, of course, is no surprise as Woodworth’s famous successor Orin G. Libby wrote his dissertation, and probably his most important work, on the U.S. Constitution.[50] 

Woodworth: Man and Society

            The final key element of the professionalization process evident in the career of Horace B. Woodworth is that his work as a historian provided him with his income rather than previously acquired or long held wealth.  While the social standing and backgrounds necessary to gain access academic positions varied among the rapidly changing universities during the late 19^th and early 20^th century, initially, at least, the opportunity of paid teaching positions in the discipline opened to individuals of more modest means than their 19^th century predecessors.[51]  Salaries earned by teaching provided these individuals with the time and resources for research and writing at the same time that AHA sought to establish professional standards that replaced stylistic elegance with rigid and almost mechanical precision characteristic of the modernist cult of objectivity.[52]

            While little is specific detail is known of Woodworth’s financial situation, there is no reason to assume that he was wealthy.  In fact, he spent much of his life farming, first in Vermont and then in various places in the Midwest.  A modest rural background would have been in keeping with many of Dartmouth College’s students. With his appointment at the university his salary was $2000 a year consistent with other faculty of his rank.  This would have allowed him to live comfortably in town – he lived in a modest house at 815 S. 5^th St. in Grand Forks – and to enjoy the benefits of a middle class lifestyle.  Although as his position as a professor at the University would have afforded him some social clout as well as responsibilities, he spent some of his on charitable activities.[53]  In a statement read by Vernon Squires, Joseph Kennedy and M.A. Brannon into the minutes on the occasion of Woodworth’s retirement in 1904, it is noted that he contributed money to the university’s maintenance.[54]

Woodworth’s family life likewise seems consistent with a middle class and perhaps upwardly mobile existence.  He had two daughters, and it is possible to gain some sense of his position in the community and American society by considering their lives.  Alice Woodworth Cooley worked in the administration of the Minneapolis city schools and co-authored a well-regarded English grammar.[55]  In 1901 she returned to Grand Forks to take up a position in the School of Education before she retired in 1905 she was the Assistant Professor of Education.  She also taught for a semester her father’s course titled The Reformation as an European Event in the 1901-1902 academic year when he was ill.  With a well-developed professional reputation and access to solidly middle class society, she married C. F. Cooley who would become a local judge.  Woodworth’s other daughter, Henrietta (Hattie) Woodworth also taught at the University briefly in music in 1889, although her father objected to her appointment.[56]  She married W. A. Gordon a New York City native and Amherst graduate who made his fortune as a real estate developer and insurance broker.  He was for many years a prominent citizen in Grand Forks and a staunch supporter of the university in the crisis of the 1890s at one point travelling with Merrifield to Bismarck to lobby on the university’s behalf.[57]  The intermarrying of Woodworth’s daughters with members of the local “gentry” is a good indication that the Woodworth family was not limited by the later breach between “town and gown”.  Recalling the situation perhaps 15 years later, Orin G. Libby’s eldest son, Charles, noted that university families tended to live near one another and children of the university professors did not necessarily play with the children in town.[58]  While the information of Woodworth himself remains modest, his family demonstrated access to middle and upper class society in Grand Forks. 

            Despite the appearance that Woodworth circulated among the elite society of Grand Forks, there are some indications that Woodworth himself remained dependent upon income from his position at the university.  After he retired he received a modest pension from the university of $600 a year and professor emeritus standing.  Webster Merrifield, who had been in regular contact with Carnegie Foundation in an effort to secure funds for a new library, in 1906 inquired whether Woodworth would be eligible for a Carnegie Fund Pension.[59]  In this letter Merrifield specifically cited his friend’s former salary of $2000 a year.  Woodworth did not live to hear that he had been awarded a Carnegie Pension.  The letter announcing that he had been awarded a Carnegie Pension of $1000 a year for life arrived two days after his funeral in 1907.[60]

Conclusion

            Placing Horace B. Woodworth’s career at the University of North Dakota in its professional, academic, and social context provides a distinct insight into the emergence of history as a profession at the University of North Dakota.  The goal of this brief chapter was to offer a gentle corrective on the idea that the professionalization project in the discipline of history sprung fully formed from several prestigious intellectual hubs (Harvard, Johns Hopkins, later Wisconsin and elsewhere) whence properly qualified individuals streamed forth to pollinate universities throughout the U.S. This model, with its emphasis on academic prosopography at the expense of individual development, posits that the main impetus for the development of history as a profession was external to the structure and faculty of the university.  While Orin G. Libby’s status as “Father of North Dakota History” should in no way be diminished, his arrival at the University of North Dakota in 1902 deserves a more refined context.  The case study of Woodworth shows that creating space in the university dedicated for the “Professor of History” preceded the appointment of an individual, like Libby, who held the typical array of scholarly credentials characteristic of the discipline at the turn of the century.  In many cases the intelligent and intellectually qualified individuals who served at Professors of History transformed their own identities to accommodate, in some capacity, many of the professional standards projected from Henry Baxter Adam’s seminars and the increasing emphasis on formal rigor encouraged by the American Historical Association and academic publications.  This internal transition at University of North Dakota was, on the one hand, the product of limited resources, disparate and changing priorities of the university, and the growing competition for the limited scholars with professional credentials.  On the other hand, it speaks to the general effectiveness of Woodworth as a member of the faculty.  His ability to transform his own credentials in response to national expectations is clear in his publications and the persistence and sophistication of the curriculum that he implemented.  Woodworth’s standing in Grand Forks society, however, emphasizes that he was not perceived as an outsider bringing a foreign profession to the prairie, but rather like many of the locals a man determined to make good in a changing environment.