CAMPUS MASTER PLAN

Campus Plan History

The University began as The Agricultural and Mechanical College of the State of Mississippi, one of the national Land-Grant Colleges established after Congress passed the Morrill Act in 1862. The Mississippi Legislature created the College on February 28, 1878, to fulfill the mission of offering training in "agriculture, horticulture and the mechanical arts without excluding other scientific and classical studies, including military tactics." The College received its first students in the fall of 1880 under the presidency of General Stephen D. Lee.

Currently the main Mississippi State University campus encompasses 4,200 acres and is bounded by both publicly and privately held properties.

Early campus planning loosely followed two philosophies:

• The Railroad
  When the college was formed in 1880, no roads led to the campus. Everyone arrived and departed by train. In 1894, the first wooden sidewalks were installed, connecting the railroad and campus buildings. Prominent roadways have followed the railroad tracks, and the remnants of these systems remain evident to this day.
• The Olmsted Plan
  Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect and planner, developed a prototypical plan for land-grant institutions that favored an informal arrangement of buildings placed in a semi-rural setting with curvilinear streets, a concept tempered later with formal axial planning of certain campus areas.