Cornell University’s Mineral Rights in Wisconsin: A Legacy of the 1862 Morrill Act

The following research is apart of a broader CU&ID project, “Visualizing the Land Grab,” conducted by Jon Parmenter (History Department, Cornell University), Marina Johnson-Zafiris (Information Science, Cornell University) and Dusti Bridges (Archaeology, Cornell University) – with the support of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program and the Cornell University Grants Program for Digital Collections. Below is an accompanied text authored by Dr. Jon Parmenter.

People are often surprised to learn that Cornell University retains a 50% severed mineral interest on 155,340 acres of land scattered across twelve northern Wisconsin counties.  How did the University acquire these rights? What do they represent? What could they mean for the future of the University and for the current residents of those counties? This data visualization aims to bring this hitherto-untold story to light in a new way – one that will promote greater awareness of this aspect of the University’s real estate investment portfolio and raise questions about the potential implications of the University exercising these rights for financial development at some future date.

Cornell University, as New York State’s designated land-grant university under the terms of the Morrill Act of 1862, received 989,920 acres of public land derived from treaty surrenders by Indigenous nations as a form of start-up funding. The Morrill Act mandated the investment of proceeds from the sale of allocated public lands into a “perpetual fund” (i.e., an endowment) to support the University’s instructional mission of agriculture, the mechanic arts (i.e., engineering) and military science.  From 1865 to 1867, University founder Ezra Cornell selected 499,126.33 acres of federally-granted public land in northern Wisconsin with an eye toward its abundant pine timber resources.  In July 1887, following the peak of Cornell’s profitable timberland sales during the early 1880s, interest in iron ore prospecting in northern Wisconsin led University officials to establish a mineral reservation clause for all future sales of land in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Initial efforts by the University to retain 100% of mineral rights on its lands offered for sale discouraged prospective buyers, so the University settled on a 50% severed interest as a compromise.  A clause reserving “an undivided one-half interest in all minerals which have been or may be discovered on or under the above described land” appeared in most of Cornell’s printed land contracts after mid-1889. (1)  This provision ultimately yielded to the University a fifty-percent shared of reserved mineral rights to 155,340 acres of land sold in Wisconsin from 1889 to 1938. (2) 

The tidy list of acreage-by-county that provided the basis for this data visualization masks nearly a century of complex history involving institutional memory loss, bureaucratic snafus, and inter-departmental administrative turf battles that unfolded prior to Cornell University’s decision in June 1987 to register its retained mineral interests in compliance with Wisconsin state legislation. Prior to 1922, University Treasurer Emmons Levi Williams prioritized efforts to negotiate large-scale leases of the University’s mineral rights to iron-mining companies, but these do not appear to have yielded significant revenues to the institution. (3)  The University would also occasionally release its mineral reservations outright or sell them to buyers for a nominal fee if it deemed particular lands unlikely to be worth the trouble of reserving mineral rights as a condition of sale.  On April 29, 1922, Cornell’s Committee on General Administration decided to bar all future sales of the University’s retained mineral rights, even on parcels with no indication of the presence of valuable minerals. (4)

Once removed from active marketing, Cornell University’s retained mineral interests in Wisconsin faded from institutional memory.  The issue vanished from University records until after World War II, when all of the individuals involved in their initial registration and management had left the institution, to say nothing of the dispersal or disposal of relevant files.  By 1952 Neil Stamp of the Office of University Counsel confessed that the University’s institutional knowledge of its reserved mineral holdings in Wisconsin “is so sketchy that we cannot determine with any accuracy at this point to what extent the University should go in an effort to protect” them. (5) The question of Cornell’s Wisconsin mineral rights remained in limbo until the sensational 1968 discovery of copper ore in northwestern Wisconsin (near the Flambeau River, southwest of the town of Ladysmith in Rusk County), smack in the middle of Cornell’s former Morrill Act lands with retained mineral interests, jarred University administrators out of their state of inertia. (6)

Efforts by the Kennecott Copper Corporation to acquire Cornell’s reserved share of mineral interests on an eighty-acre parcel of land south of Ladysmith, Wisconsin ignited in 1972 a seven-year odyssey by John Bentkowski of Cornell University’s Real Estate Office to account for Cornell University’s retained mineral rights in Wisconsin. (7) Operating in the historical context of a domestic energy crisis and wide-eyed speculation regarding the potential wealth to be gained from the massive sulfide deposits discovered in Wisconsin, Bentkowski’s research into Cornell’s initial profit-taking from its Morrill Act lands in the Badger State led him to argue strenuously for returning to that metaphorical well once more to reap financial benefits to the University. (8) In a December 1974 request to the Cornell Board of Trustees for funds to support his efforts to reconstitute Cornell’s portfolio of reserved mineral interests in Wisconsin, Bentkowski wrapped his proposal in the mantle of the University’s founder,  stating his “sincerest hope is that in these times of economic concern Ezra Cornell’s legacy might continue to help the University.” (9)

While Bentkowski never received the full measure of support he requested from institutional leaders, he managed to keep the embers of the idea alive long enough to ensure that his successors in the Real Estate Office would see the project through to completion.  By March, 1985, Cornell University officials announced their intent to comply with 1984 Wisconsin legislation (Statute 706.057) requiring the owners of severed mineral interests to record their claims with appropriate county registers of deeds on or before July 1. 1987. (10)  From June 1 to June 26, 1987, Cornell University filed its claims to reserved mineral rights on 155,460 acres in twelve Wisconsin counties, paying a total of $151.50 in fees to the State of Wisconsin. (11) Cornell University renewed these rights in additional filings with the State of Wisconsin (and the relevant counties) from April 30, 2018 to January 31, 2020, incurring expenses totaling $17,576.94 (the bulk of which were attorney fees charged for updated title searches). (12)

How do these reserved mineral rights in Wisconsin represent an asset in Cornell University’s financial portfolio? Documents made available by the Real Estate Office to support the author’s research indicate without question that the University has, to date, spent far more money to retain these rights than it has received in revenue.  Does that mean that they represent a “negative” or “non-producing” asset – one that costs more to maintain, with little hope of return, than to simply abandon?  

On the one hand, University administrators have long struggled with the practical problem of “how one utilizes a one-half interest in mineral rights when the other half-interest is owned by the surface owner.”  Compounding that problem is the matter of assembling a viable transaction involving multiple surface owners (given the non-contiguous nature of University-held parcels), particularly in northern Wisconsin, where both Indigenous nations and the highly-organized dairy industry would likely have significant concerns over the adverse effects of metallic mining on the surface uses of their lands. (13)

On the other hand, Wisconsin State law regards mineral rights as a “dominant estate” insofar as they authorize their owner to go onto the surface of the property in question and mine its minerals with only the attendant obligations of compensating the surface owner for damages, providing ground support for any buildings on the land, and presenting any co-tenants with an accounting of profits from the mining activity to enable their recovery of a proportionate share of same. (14) In addition to sentimental reasons for the University’s retention of reserved mineral rights on its former Morrill Act lands (though it should be noted that the idea of such reservations arose long after Ezra Cornell’s passing in 1874), the recent example of the incredible wealth generated by the Flambeau Mine continues to conjure up visions of a massive windfall just waiting to fall into the University’s proverbial lap.  Given the prospect of technological advancements and the growing demand of industry for the substantial deposits of metallic sulfides known to exist in the bedrock of northwestern Wisconsin, the potential long-term value of Cornell’s retained mineral rights in Wisconsin cannot readily be dismissed. Additionally, the mining of industrial sand used for hydrofracking (a.k.a. “frac sand”) is currently widespread in northern Wisconsin, with one operating mine in Rusk County a mere township away from a parcel on which Cornell holds reserved mineral rights. (15)

What are Cornell University’s intentions with regard to these reserved mineral rights in Wisconsin? Cornell’s status as a private institution permits University authorities to remain silent about its investment strategies (and the specifics concerning the sources of revenues), but we can infer from two examples in the recent past that the University aims to preserve its reserved mineral rights in Wisconsin as part of a long-term hold strategy in hopes of an eventual future payoff – this echoes the founder’s objectives in acquiring nearly a half-million acres of pine timberland in northern Wisconsin immediately after the Civil War.  Mr. Cornell did not live to see the fruits of his investment, but it paid off handsomely for the University after 1881. 

In 1991, Cornell University contested the decision of Rusk County to extinguish the University’s reserved mineral rights on a parcel of land sold by the County as a result of the surface owner’s forefeiture for delinquent taxes – the essential argument being that Wisconsin’s unitary taxing system at that time held that upon issuance of a tax deed, all interests in the property are transferred to the county save for those specifically exempted by statute.  Because privately-owned severed mineral interests were not, at that time, specifically exempted by statute, a tax deed extinguished the proprietary interest of the mineral owner.  Cornell lost the case in the Wisconsin Court of Appeals on January 14, 1992, and its subsequent attempts to appeal the decision in the state and U.S. Supreme courts failed.  But on May 15, 1994 University lobbyists succeeded in securing the passage of a one-page bill in the Wisconsin State Legislature, rushed through the final days of the spring legislative session without public discussion, which effectively overturned the Court of Appeals ruling.  The law states that “the failure of an owner of a fee simple interest in surface rights to pay property taxes on land does not extinguish the rights of a holder of a fee simple interest in severed mineral rights related to that land.”  This legislation secured the University’s reserved mineral interests on lands in Wisconsin and enabled the University to continue to avoid paying property taxes on those mineral rights. (16) Bitter feelings among Wisconsin’s non-Native population regarding these circumstances occasionally surface. (17)

More recently, increased awareness of Cornell University’s retention of a fifty-percent severed mineral interest on a 160-acre parcel of land in Barron County, Wisconsin containing a pipestone quarry considered sacred by local Anishinaabe peoples has revealed Cornell’s attitude toward its retained mineral rights.  Notwithstanding the distinctive character of the land, the role that University ownership of the parcel and retention of the mineral rights has played in disrupting Indigenous peoples’ access to the quarry since the late nineteenth century, the quarry’s entry in the National Register of Historic Places (the Wajiwan ji Mashkode Archaeological District) in 2003, and an in-person appeal by Dr. Rick St. Germaine of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe Indians at Cornell on March 25, 2024, Dr. Katherine McComas, Cornell University’s Vice Provost for Engagement and Land Grant Affairs, has failed to even respond to requests to transfer the University’s retained mineral interests on this unique parcel to the Lac Courte Oreilles (LCO) tribal government.  Possession of the fifty-percent mineral interest currently held by Cornell would empower the LCO Tribe to negotiate access to the mineral resources on that site with Barron County, the current surface owner. By transferring the mineral interest to the LCO Tribe, the University would contribute to the revitalization of Indigenous cultural practice and repair a longstanding injustice.  Given the refusal of Cornell officials (to date) to address the matter, it seems reasonable to conclude that the University’s current intention is to retain its mineral rights portfolio in Wisconsin, even to the extent of perpetuating its legacy of dispossession of Wisconsin’s Indigenous population.

Moving forward, we can predict that Cornell University will eventually seek to redeem these mineral interests to advance its own financial interests.  This may not happen soon, as mining companies conduct careful title searches and will wish to avoid dealing with an entity as sophisticated and “lawyered-up” as Cornell University for as long as possible (witness the Rusk County frac sand mine a township away from Cornell holdings).  Eventually, however, just as was the case with pine timberlands during the 1880s, Cornell holds a considerable asset in these mineral rights and appears to have no compunction about engaging in another round of resource extraction in Wisconsin to buttress its current $10B endowment. At present, Cornell appears no closer to any kind of reckoning with its extractivist orientation toward the natural resources of northern Wisconsin than it would have been in the days of its founding – a founding grounded upon profit-taking from the proceeds of Indigenous dispossession.

ENDNOTES

(1). E.L. Williams to Messrs. F.G. and E.B. Foss, July 26, 1880, Cornell Western Land Committee Records, Cornell University Library Rare and Manuscript Collections (hereafter RMC) 7/4/12 7/4/12, Box 30, Folder 17, p.523; E.H. Holbert to Williams, June 4, 1886, RMC 7/4/12, Box 16, Folder 6; Smith Robertson to Williams, September 25, 1886, ibid; Robertson to Williams, September 28, 1886, ibid; Williams to Robertson, October 13, 1886, RMC 7/4/12, Box 31, Folder 20, pp.656-57 (N.B. p.657 in Box 31, Folder 11); Williams to Robertson, December 8, 1886, RMC 7/4/12, Box 31, Folder 11, pp.685-87; Williams to F.M. Finch, April 8, 1887, RMC 7/4/12, Box 32, Folder 2; Robertson to Williams, May 17, 1887, RMC 7/4/12, Box 16, Folder 11; Williams to Robertson, June 4, 1887, RMC 7/4/12, Box 32, Folder 2, pp.91-92; Williams to Robertson, July 7, 1887, ibid, pp.123-25; Robertson to Williams, August 11. 1887, RMC 7/4/12, Box 16, Folder 12; Robertson to Williams, February 21, 1889, RMC 7/4/12, Box 17, Folder 9; Williams to Robertson, April 28, 1889, RMC 7/4/12, Box 33, Folder 5; Williams to Robertson, May 29, 1889, RMC 7/4/12, Box 32, Folder 5, p.521.

(2). Cornell also retained a 50% share of mineral rights on an indeterminate number of former Morrill Act parcels sold in Minnesota but institutional records are problematic insofar as they indicate claimed holdings in Minnesota counties outside of those with documented Morrill Act parcels (the latter are restricted to Kandiyohi, Meeker, Pope, Renville, and Todd counties).  Ultimately, the outcome of a 1979 Minnesota court case, Contos v. Herbst, 278 N.W. 2d 732 (Minn 1979) (https://casetext.com/case/contos-v-herbst) (accessed January 23, 2023) meant that the University’s failure to register these rights by a state-imposed deadline in 1975 would have forced payment of back taxes amounting to over $12,000 in 1981 to preserve any retained mineral rights.  This development, and an opinion from the Minnesota Geological Survey indicating the remote likelihood of commercial ore discovery on the parcels in which the University retained a 50% share of rights, led Jonathan Ferrini of Cornell’s Real Estate Office to advise the Office of the University Counsel on February 25, 1981 that “it would not be in Cornell’s best interests to make substantial payments of taxes indefinitely to maintain these mineral sites.”  The full story of the de facto forfeiture of the University’s retained mineral rights in Minnesota can be traced in the following documents in the Cornell Real Estate Office – Wisconsin File (hereafter CREO-WF): Memorandum on Morrill Act Lands in Minnesota, July 1, 1956 (unsigned); John Bentkowski, “Tracts in which Cornell has mineral rights in Minnesota,” January 27, 1978; Charles H. Burgess to Robert M. Matyas, February 22, 1978; Bentkowski to Matyas, October 11, 1978; William Stern to Ralph R. Barnard, March 13, 1979; Barnard to Elwood Rafn, March 16, 1979; Jonathan Ferrini to Barnard, February 25, 1981; Ferrini to Ralph Barnard, May 15, 1981; Ferrini to Barnard, May 27, 1981.  In regard to reserved mineral rights on Cornell’s former Morrill Act holdings in Kansas, Bentkowski’s letter of October 11, 1978 (cited above) reported that they were “lost or of no value.”

(3). Williams to J.W. Robinson, September 9, 1908, copy in CREO-WF; Minutes, Cornell Board of Trustees, November 7, 1908, RMC 2/3/74, Box 98, Folder 2; Minutes, Cornell Board of Trustees, November 24, 1908, RMC 2/3/74, Box 100, Folder 10; Minutes, Cornell Board of Trustees, January 23, 1909, RMC 2/3/74, Box 98, Folder 22; Cornell University, Office of Investments Records, RMC 7/2/82, Box 2, Folder 502.  In his September 9, 1908 letter to Robinson, Williams lamented that the University’s lands in an adjoining section to those leased to Robinson for mineral exploration had been sold to the Chippewa Logging Corporation in 1882 This was a massive sale of 109,601 acres that yielded over $1.8 million for the University.  See Paul Wallace Gates, The Wisconsin Pine Lands of Cornell University (1943; rpt. ed., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 234-35.

(4). Committee on General Administration, Minutes, April 29, 1922, RMC 2/3/74, Box 98, Folder 32.  The decision was affirmed in October 1923.  See Committee on General Administration, Minutes, October 12, 1923, RMC 2/3/74, Box 4, Folder 2.

(5). Stamp to Allen Pray, May 14, 1952, CREO-WF.

(6). Improvements in geological exploration after 1960, such as the use of specially-instrumented aircraft to fly over target areas collecting data on magnetic fields and electrical conductivity of the ground below, facilitated the discovery of mineral deposits in Wisconsin’s Precambrian Shield (such as at Ladysmith), previously obscured by the drift deposited over it by Pleistocene-era glaciation.  See Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey, “Short Geologic History of Wisconsin” (Madison: August 1977); M.G. Mudrey and M.E. Ostrom, “Massive Sulfide Deposits in Wisconsin,” University of Wisconsin, Madison, University-Industry Research Program Newsletter 12.1 (Fall 1977): 2, 31.  On the Flambeau Mine, see Gene LaBerge, Joanne Kluessendorf, and William Cordua, A Story Written in Stone: The Flambeau Mine, Ladysmith, Wisconsin (privately published, 2014); available at https://uwosh.edu/weis/wp-content/uploads/sites/147/2019/08/Flambeau-Mine.pdf (accessed January 23, 2023).  The 181-acre Flambeau Mine operated from 1991 to 1999 as the only example to date of a metallic mine permitted, constructed, operated, and subsequently reclaimed under Wisconsin’s environmental regulatory framework.  The Flambeau Mine produced a total of 181,000 tons of copper, 334,000 ounces of gold, and 3.3 million ounces of silver. See https://www.flambeaumine.com/ (accessed January 23, 2023).

(7). Ralph Barnard to John Bentkowski, October 17, 1972, CREO-WF.

(8). Bentkowski to Barnard, January 25, 1973; Bentkowski to Arthur Peterson, November 26, 1973; Bentkowski, “Wisconsin Lands and Mineral Interests” (draft proposal to Board of Trustees, September 16, 1974), CREO-WF.

(9). Bentkowski, “Wisconsin Land and Mineral Interests: A Proposal for Consideration by Trustees of Cornell University, President Dale Corson, and Administrative Officers,” December 6, 1974, CREO-WF.

(10). Shirley K. Egan to Department of Administration, Division of Administrative Services, State of Wisconsin, March 6, 1985, CREO-WF.

(11). These figures were compiled from information in the individual county files containing the 1987 registration paperwork in CREO-WF.  It is not known if attorney’s fees were paid in the 1987 filing since the University had expended its own resources in searching titles prior to that date.

(12). Cornell Real Estate Office, e-mail communication to the author, October 23, 2020. Note the discrepancy between the total acreage registered in 1987 (155,460 acres) relative to the 155,340 acres documented as of 2023.  This appears to be accounted for by the post-1987 losses of eighty and forty acres (possibly to tax deed sales) in Chippewa and Vilas counties (respectively).

(13). Undated (circa 1978) memorandum from Robert Matyas to Bentkowski, CREO-WF (quotes).  Cf. Dwight F. Kalash, “Severed Mineral Interests: A Problem Without a Solution,” North Dakota Law Review 46 (1970): 451-64.

(14). William Sherman to Barnard, November 10, 1978, CREO-WF; Tom Barkin and John Preston, “Mineral Rights in Wisconsin,” University of Wisconsin-Extension, Geological and Natural History Survey Information Circular No.25 (November 1974): 7.

(15).  Thomas W. Pearson, When the Hills Are Gone: Frac Sand Mining and the Struggle for Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).  Two current frac sand mines in Wisconsin are operating on formerly-owned Cornell parcels of land, but these parcels were sold by the University prior to the implementation of the mineral reservation policy.  These mines are: Superior Silica Sand in Auburn, WI (Chippewa Co., located in the SE ¼, Sec.35, Town 32, Range 10W) and Source Energy Services’ Sand Processing Plant in Weyerhaeuser, WI (Rusk Co., located in the NE ¼, Sec.18, Town 34, Range 8W).

(16). Jeff Mayers, “Mine Law: Fair Deal or Ripoff? Bill Slid Past Legislature,” Wisconsin State Journal, May 15, 1994, 1A-2A.

(17). Susan Lampert Smith, “Ivy League’s Cornell Picked Wisconsin’s Cornell Clean,” Wisconsin State Journal, November 7, 1999, 1E, 4E.