In 1862, the U.S. Congress passed the Morrill Act, which entitled each state to receive thirty thousand acres of federal land and to use it and the income from its sale to establish agricultural and mechanical colleges. In 1878, after a failed attempt to begin a land-grant program in Oxford at the University of Mississippi and pressed by the Mississippi Grange, an organization that promoted agricultural development, the state legislature created The Agricultural and Mechanical College (A&M) of the state of Mississippi on a tract near Starkville, and the first students arrived in 1880. The all-male institution became Mississippi State University in 1958, and it was uneventfully integrated in 1965.
The earliest buildings stood on ground that is now part of the main quadrangle, or Drill Field, so-named because male students marched here as a part of their Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) training. Perhaps the most famous building was Old Main Dormitory (Old Main), which stood on the west side of the quadrangle (where the union building and McCool Hall are today) until it burned in 1959. Six years later the Chapel of Memories (Dean and Pursell), consisting of a chapel, carillon, and courtyard, was constructed northwest of the quad using salvaged brick from the dormitory. Brick patterning and Tudor arches provide the chapel’s primary exterior expression, and the arched form is repeated inside as laminated wooden beams.