Background

Isaac Tichenor Goodnow was born on January 17, 1814, in Whitingham. He was the son of William and Sybil (Arms) Goodnow.

Education

Goodnow attended the local schools and at the age of fourteen became a merchant’s clerk.

At twenty, he entered the Wesleyan Academy, Wilbraham, Massachusets, for four years of study.

Career

In 1848, Goodnow accepted a position as professor of natural sciences at the Providence Conference Seminary and moved from Wilbraham to East Greenwich, Rhode Island.

Resigning his professorship, he devoted himself for several months to raising a company of some 200 emigrants, who left Boston in March 1855 and founded the town of Manhattan, Kansas.

Goodnow was a member of the committee which selected the townsite. He was one of the representatives of Manhattan in the Free-State convention held at Lawrence in August 1855, and in April 1858 was a member of the convention which drew up the Leavenworth Constitution.

In 1857, he had returned to the East to solicit funds for the establishment of a Methodist church in Manhattan, and secured $4, 000.

Encouraged by this success, he took a leading part, together with his brother-in-law, Joseph Denison, and Washington Marlatt, in the founding of Bluemont Central College.

In the interest of this institution Goodnow again visited the East, and raised $15, 000 in cash and a library of some two thousand miscellaneous volumes. The college was chartered by the territorial legislature in 1858 and the cornerstone laid at Manhattan in 1859.

Goodnow was elected to the first state legislature, in November 1861, and secured the passage of a bill locating the state university at Manhattan. The bill was vetoed by Gov. Charles Robinson, however, and the university established at Lawrence, but a year later, when the Morrill Act made possible the establishment of a state agricultural college, the offer by the trustees of Bluemont Central College of their building, land, and equipment as the nucleus for such a school, was accepted, and in September 1863 the Kansas State Agricultural College was opened at Manhattan.

In 1862 and again in 1864, Goodnow was elected state superintendent of public instruction, in which capacity he was ex officio a regent of the Agricultural College.

In 1866, he was made agent to dispose of some 82, 000 acres of land belonging to the college, and before 1873, when he relinquished the office, had sold about 42, 000 acres. He was subsequently appointed land commissioner of the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railway, which office he held for seven years.

During that time, he sold land amounting to more than $1, 500, 000. The last ten or twelve years of his life, he spent quietly at his home near Manhattan, where he died.

Achievements

• Goodnow was instrumental in developing both the city of Manhattan and the Bluemont Central College, which later became Kansas State University. He established the Manhattan Town Association in order to prevent claim jumpers from taking the site where the college was to be erected; he raised funds to build the college as well as for books and other necessities.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Kansas Conflict. With an introduction by I. T. Goodnow.

    ( Title: The Kansas Conflict. With an introduction by I. ...)

Views

Since 1840, when he had voted for James G. Birney, Goodnow had been outspoken in his opposition to the extension of slavery, and in 1854, he became vitally interested in the project of the New England Emigrant Aid Company to send Free-Soil colonists to Kansas.

Connections

On August 28, 1838, Goodnow was married to Ellen D. Denison. Isaac and Ellen had no children of their own but raised Goodnow's niece, Harriet Parkerson.

Father:

William Goodnow

Mother:

Sybil Goodnow

Niece:

Harriet Parkerson

Wife:

Ellen D. Denison