North Central Missouri College | Trenton, Missouri
In 1925, Trenton was trying to create a college without a campus of its own.
Don McVay, president of the Community Club, began making the case that the town could support a junior college. Both local newspapers carried advertisements encouraging the idea.
The new Trenton High School had opened on East Ninth Street the previous year. Superintendent Oren G. Sanford believed its third floor could hold college classes, and that the new college could share teachers and administration with the public schools. Sanford would oversee both systems.
The building is now Adams Park Apartments.
Alice May and Dale Hoffman, owners of Hoffman Fair Acres Farm, joined the effort to secure the money needed to begin.
Together, those efforts gave Trenton Junior College enough to open its doors.
The first class included 67 students from 12 communities. Tuition was $5 per credit hour, laboratory courses cost another $5, and students coming from outside Trenton could find room and board for about a dollar a day.
They came from Gallatin, Milan, Jamesport, Laredo, Chula, St. Joseph, and other communities throughout the region.
For more than 40 years, the arrangement with the public schools kept the college operating. In 1967, it moved from the high school to the former Central School, now Geyer Hall, but it still remained under the Trenton school board.
By the following year, the college had outgrown the system created for it.
It had no tax levy of its own. Its legal district covered only Trenton R-IX, although college staff reported serving students from 31 additional high schools across eight counties.
A school district organized to serve one community had become responsible for a college serving much of northern Missouri.
By the early 1980s, separating the two systems had become a serious local discussion. The same board still governed both, often beginning with public-school business at 7 p.m. and continuing with college matters until nearly midnight.
Independence would require more than changing a name. The college would need its own president, employees, budget, policies, offices, and governing board. Local voters would have to decide whether the institution was worth assuming that responsibility.
Frank Hoffman, whose parents had helped secure money for the college in 1925, helped carry that discussion forward.
On April 1, 1986, voters created an independent junior college district. Hoffman became one of its first six trustees.
The newly independent college could now govern and build for the region it had already been serving. Its main campus continued to grow through new classrooms, student facilities, agricultural programs, and community spaces.
Another major addition came through land.
Arthur Barton left property to the college, and in the fall of 2011, more than 100 acres southeast of Trenton opened as the Elizabeth and Arthur Barton Farm Campus. The land provided room for agricultural classrooms, training buildings, livestock, crop research, and hands-on education rooted in the work of this region.
North Central Missouri College began with borrowed rooms on the third floor of a high school.
It's still here because across several generations, people kept placing what they had behind the belief that young people growing up here were worth the work required to keep higher education close.
