The Neighbor Who Won Missouri Its University: James S. Rollins

Long before the University of Missouri was a fixture of Columbia life, it was an open question which town would get it — and it took a stubborn Boone County lawmaker named James S. Rollins to make sure the answer was ours.

The fight for the university

According to the State Historical Society of Missouri, Rollins was a lawyer and legislator who threw himself into the campaign to locate the new state university in Boone County in the late 1830s. When the state agreed to put the university wherever local citizens raised the most money and land, Boone County residents dug deep — and Columbia won. For his decades of advocacy Rollins is remembered as the “Father of the University of Missouri.”

A long public life

Rollins served in the Missouri legislature and in Congress, and stayed involved with the university as a curator for much of his life, per MU University Archives. He died in 1888. It is a piece of local history worth remembering the next time Mizzou comes up: the university sits in Columbia, and not somewhere else, in no small part because one Boone County neighbor refused to let it go anywhere else.