Drive through Columbia today and Mizzou feels like it’s always just been there. It wasn’t a given. Missouri had to decide where to put its state university, and six centrally located counties all wanted it. Boone County won that fight — and a young Columbia lawyer named James S. Rollins is the reason we did.
Rollins was born in Kentucky in 1812 and came to Columbia to practice law after finishing his degree at Transylvania University in 1834. He didn’t waste much time getting into public life: he’d already served under arms in the Black Hawk War as a young man, and by 1838 Boone County voters had sent him to the Missouri legislature, according to the State Historical Society of Missouri.
That legislative seat put Rollins in exactly the right place at the right moment. When the state decided to establish its first public university, lawmakers set up a competition: whichever county could raise the most money would get to host it. Rollins, newly elected, drafted the bill laying out how that competition would work — and then turned around and helped lead Boone County’s own campaign to win it, according to MU’s University Archives. Six counties across central Missouri put in bids. With Rollins pushing the fundraising effort, Boone County came out on top, and Columbia became the home of the University of Missouri in 1839.
Winning the university wasn’t the end of Rollins’s involvement — if anything, it was just the start of a lifetime. He kept serving in the state legislature through the 1840s and 50s, ran for governor twice without success, and went on to represent Missouri in the U.S. Congress from 1860 to 1864, holding the state together in Washington through the hardest years of the Civil War. Rollins also had his hands in the region’s growth well beyond politics — agriculture, real estate, and river and rail transportation, including a role in building the North Missouri Railroad.
But it’s the university that Rollins kept coming back to. After the Civil War, he returned to Columbia and threw himself into rebuilding and growing the school he’d helped bring here, becoming President of the university’s Board of Curators in 1869. From that post he pushed through the school’s Normal Department (for training teachers), secured funding to build a home for the university’s president, and successfully fought to make Mizzou Missouri’s federal land-grant institution under the Morrill Act — a designation that shaped the university’s mission and funding for generations after him.
Rollins served the university in one capacity or another for close to fifty years, finally stepping down from the Board of Curators in 1886. He died in Columbia in January 1888 and is buried in the city’s cemetery. The university still marks his legacy today — Rollins Commons on campus carries his name — and historians still call him what his contemporaries did: the Father of the University of Missouri.
It’s worth remembering, next time you’re in Columbia and Mizzou’s campus is just part of the scenery, that a Boone County lawmaker had to go out and win it for us, one county’s fundraising campaign at a time.