ing to the
desire of the residents of the Northern Peninsula to have a state
institution in that section, although a number of degrees in mining
engineering were granted. A course in mechanical engineering was also
authorized by the Regents in 1868, one of the very first to be organized
in this country, but the degree was abolished two years later and the
course was merged with civil engineering. One of the last acts of
Professor Wood, before his resignation to accept a similar chair at
Stevens Institute of Technology, was to present to the Regents a
detailed plan for a School of Engineering and Technology as a fourth
department of the University--foreshadowing the action taken
twenty-three years later when engineering was made a separate
department in the University.

The appointment of Charles Ezra Greene, Harvard, '62, Mass. Inst.
Technology, '68, in 1872 marks a definite period in the history of this
department. He found himself associated with two other men who had been
instructors for a short period under Professor Wood, J.B. Davis, '68_e_,
Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, who became Professor of
Geodesy and Surveying in 1891, and Charles S. Denison, Vermont, '70, who
was to be in later years Professor of Stereotomy, Mechanism, and
Drawing. These men saw the Department grow almost to its present
proportions, and, as the first Faculty, formed a most harmonious
combination of unusually varied elements. Professor Greene was a scholar
and scientist who had a wide reputation as an engineer and an author;
Professor Davis, on the contrary, was a practical man, a genius, whose
love of the outdoors and fatherly care of his "boys" even extended to
their "rubbers" on wet days, while his homely and wise sayings endeared
him to every student. Professor Denison was a bachelor, small and very
particular in personal appearance, who was long known by the students as
"Little Lord Chesterfield," but an able teacher who was loved for his
big heart and his very mannerisms. A course in mechanical engineering
was again inaugurated in 1881 when Mortimer E. Cooley, Annapolis, '78,
Assistant Engineer, U.S.N., was detailed to the University by the Navy
Department and became the first Professor of Mechanical Engineering. In
1885 he resigned from the Navy and definitely cast his lot with the
University, becoming Dean of the College of Engineering in February,
1904, after the death of Professor Greene in October, 1903. At the same
ti