helped win them over by taking the College to the farm. In 1876 the Agricultural College held the first "Farmers' Institutes" in rural communities across the state, where school professors shared experimental and practical information with Michigan farmers. This concept led to the Hatch Act of 1887, which provided federal funding for agricultural experiment stations operated by each state's Land Grant college. Through these "Farmers' Institutes", T.C. Abbot converted many skeptical farmers into ardent College supporters.<ref>"Milestones Of MSU's Sesquicentennial". University Archives & Historical Collections. Retrieved April 14, 2007.</ref> Pioneer in Coeducation The College first admitted women in 1870 but the school's relative isolation and lack of women's living quarters tamped coeducational enrollment for decades. The few women who enrolled either boarded with faculty families or were locals who made the daily three-mile trek from Lansing by stagecoach over unpaved Michigan Avenue. The women were educated in the same scientific agriculture courses as men, excepting "practical agriculture." In 1896, the College became one of only fourteen other colleges and universities in America to adopt and meld a home economics curriculum within the liberal arts and sciences program, increasing female enrollment. That same year, the school relocated male students from the old Abbot Hall dormitory to allow for greater a number of women to enroll in the course. Considering the Morrill Act's original mandate that Land Grant Colleges teach engineering (then called "mechanic arts"), the State Agricultural College had developed civil and electrical engineering programs to complement the original mechanical program of 1885. These separate disciplines were unified in a new Department of Engineering in 1908. In 1885, in order to fill out its mandate as a Morrill Act college, the College established a Mechanics program which became the College's first full-fledged, degree-granting engineering program. When a 1916 fire destroyed the College's nine-year-old engineering hall, Lansing automobile magnate Ransom E. Olds presented with a gift of $100,000 in 1917 for a new engineering building to be erected directly upon the foundations of the burned hall. The donation resulted in Olds Hall. The original building is still standing but now houses the University Relations division as well as classroom space. In 1899, the State Agricultural College finally admitted its first African American student, William O. Thompson. After graduation, Thompson taught at what is now Tuskegee University, founded and headed by Booker T. Washington. Washington later delivered one of his most memorable addresses to