Before joining the Rhode Island College of Agricultural and Mechanical Arts, President Kenyon Butterfield had been an Instructor in Rural Sociology at the University of Michigan.

John H. Washburn was appointed to be principal of the Rhode Island Agricultural School in 1889. The land for the college had been appropriated for Rhode Island with the passage of the Morrill Act of 1862. Washburn’s first order of business was to wrest the appropriation of land-grant status from Brown University for the Rhode Island Agricultural School to become the official land-grant institution in Rhode Island.