When the idea of creating a college for home economics at Cornell was broached to President Jacob Gould Schurman in 1899, he erupted: "What! Cooks on the Cornell faculty? Never!" Even so, this was to become the foundation of what in 1907 would become the home economics department. In 1898, former school commissioner Martha Van Rensselaer had arrived to find "a basement room of Morrill Hall traversed with steam and water pipes and containing two chairs and a kitchen table with a drawer for pens and paper." She was there to teach a reading course for farmers' wives, one of whom wrote: "I cannot tell you what it means to me to think that somebody cares. My life is made up of men, men, men and mud, mud, mud." By 1903-04, Van Rensselaer was teaching three courses "relating to home and family life." Home economics moved to Comstock Hall in 1913 and became the School of Home Economics in 1919; 50 years later the college was renamed the College of Human Ecology.

-- Adapted by George Lowery from Morris Bishop's "A History of Cornell."