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  KENTUCKY UNIVERSITY.
` · F O U N D A T I O N.
l The existence of Kentucky University is due chiefly to the efforts
  of ]ohn B. Bowman, its founder and present Regent.
  _ In the year 1855, while a young man thirty years of age, he con-
i ceived the plan of building up in his native state a University, in its
full and true sense, on a modern, American, and Christian basis. \Vith
the understanding that he was t0 be free to pursue his own plans in
* his own way, he voluntarily dedicated his life to this work, and has
· prosecuted it with great success for more than twenty years, without _
H accepting a salary, and without abatement of his purposes and pledges.
I·Iis object was, as expressed in his reports to the donors and
Curators, "to build up eventually, a great, liberal institution, which,
while under the auspices of the Christian (`hurch, was to be unsecta-
rian and unseetional; also to cheapen and widen the system of higher
education, so that the humblest youth in all the land could enter it, and
receive such education, general or technical, as would qualify him for
any business of life, and that under the broad, expansive inlluences of
,· _ our advancing civilization, the blessings of the institution should flow
_, __ as free as our great rivers, accomplishing the greatest good to the
l greatest number of the coming generation.’°
With these liberal views. and for the purposes of endowments,
grounds and buildings, apparatus, libraries. museums, laboratories,
prize funds, etc., the necessary appliances for the most advanced edu- .
cation, he has secured by donations of money and property, and by
legislative acts of consolidation and confederation. assets to the amount
_ " of not less than seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which con-
stitute the present basis of the University.
These   were secured from about one thousand individual
donors, from the United States government, from the state of Ken-
tucky, and from the trustees of Bacon College and Transylvania
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