Faculty Biographies, circa 1900-1990

Montana State University was founded in 1893 as the Montana College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. Among the first faculty members were Benjamin Maiden, Frank W. Traphagen, Luther Foster, and Augustus Ryon, who also served as the first president of the institution. During the next 100 years, the University never adopted a formal collecting policy for biographical information on its faculty members, but sometime in the early 1960s library and archive staff members began gathering newspaper clippings, press releases, notes, and reminiscences to document biographical information on former and current faculty members. These items were maintained alphabetically in a series of vertical filing cabinets. The practice appears to have ceased sometime in the in the early 1990s.