name Texas A.M.C. didn't teach any agricultural classes at all, leading to protests by farmer groups and much of college's leadership being replaced. Despite the new curriculum in agriculture and engineering, the college's enrollment continued to drop. The land-grant colleges around the country were struggling. With the ample land available in the West, most farmers had little incentive to adopt intensive farming methods and other advanced agricultural technologies. As with Texas A.M.C., the agricultural colleges were being criticized for not actually giving their students the training that would enable them to return to their family farms, and instead the graduates were leaving the farm life all together. For most observers, however, the biggest issue was that there was no solid agricultural research on which to base the practical teaching being attempted, so to fill this need Congress passed the Hatch Experiment Station Act of 1887, which provided funding for agricultural experiment stations in each state. This led to the founding of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station in 1887 at Texas A.M.C. This new organization was given the task of conducting research in all aspects of crop and livestock operations. The founding of the Experiment Stations were considered a big step towards improving farming, however the Experiment Station personnel soon realized that without a way to effectively communicate their findings to farmers, all their effort was for not. While they made attempts at out-reach, the results were limited and required diverting critical funds away from their core mission: research. In 1903, Seaman Asahel Knapp (1831-1911), a US Department of Agriculture agent, created two demonstration farms - the Walter C. Porter Demonstration Farm near Terrell, and the Greenville Demonstration Farm near Greenville - where he could show other farmers how new farming techniques and production methods could benefit them. In 1906, William C. Crider was appointed by Knapp as the first county agricultural agent in Texas (Smith County), and the first in the nation to serve a single county. Tom M. Marks organized the first Boys' Corn Club in Texas in Jack County, and this forerunner of Four-H Club activities became important. Girls' clubs, home demonstration, farmers' institutes, and the establishment of a Department of Extension at Texas A&M followed. The Texas legislature passed laws authorizing the county commissioners' court to provide and fund offices and conduct extension work in agriculture and home economics with Texas A&M. On January 16, 1912, in