How a citizens' committee put a university in an Allendale cornfield

Grand Valley State University exists because a Grand Rapids businessman decided his fast-growing region needed its own four-year college and refused to wait for the state to think of it. In 1958 L. William Seidman pulled together a volunteer Committee to Establish a Four-Year College, raised local support, and pushed the idea through the legislature. On April 26, 1960, Governor G. Mennen Williams signed Public Act 120 into law, chartering the school as Michigan’s tenth state college.

Then came the question of where to build it. In 1961 the Board of Control picked an 876-acre site in Allendale, out in the Ottawa County farm country, bordered by the Grand River. It was a bold spot for a campus — rural, cut by deep wooded ravines, a real drive from the city it was meant to serve. Crews broke ground the next year, and in 1963 the first class arrived: 226 students, all freshmen, on a campus that was mostly fields and a handful of new buildings.

Those ravines became part of the school’s identity. The Little Mac footbridge later spanned one of them, a gully about 230 feet wide and 70 feet deep, stitching the north and south sides of campus together over a wooded ravine.

The cornfield won. The college that opened with 226 students grew into a university enrolling more than twenty thousand, and Allendale grew right along with it — apartments, shops, and traffic where there used to be farmland. Seidman, the man who started it with a committee, stayed on the governing board for decades and was named its first honorary life member. Not bad for a project that began as a stack of meeting minutes.