Name-a-Day Calendar, September 9: UC Davis Aggies
Page 307 of 365
Chosen in: 1922
Chosen by: Unclear
In the mid-late 1900s, the University of California established a farm near Davis, a satellite city of Sacramento, for the purpose of complementing their agricultural school. This institution, known officially as the University Farm but also colloquially as Davis Farm, held its inaugural classes in 1908. Though it offered a three-year vocational agriculture program, it wasn’t a degree-granting institution, most often being a place for students at the University of California to complete agriculture coursework while earning their degree in Berkeley. Despite this, a men’s basketball team still formed at the school as early as 1910. This team, along with the football team that followed in 1915, was most often called the Farmers.
By the early 1920s, the University Farm community had grown upset at the institution’s lack of ability to grant degrees, and the Farm resultantly threatened to separate from the University of California. Wanting to avoid this, the California Board of Regents upgraded the University Farm to the four-year, degree-granting Northern Branch of the College of Agriculture in 1922.
This institution was still not an autonomous campus of the University of California system; it was just a branch campus that the larger university essentially still had under their control. Because of this, the institution was known unofficially as “California Agricultural”, or “Cal Aggies” for short. This extended to the school’s sports teams beginning that same year, 1922, as virtually all print media references to this team were as the Cal Aggies.
The “Aggies” moniker stuck with the school even once the Board of Regents finally named it an autonomous “general campus” in 1959. That’s when the school became the University of California, Davis, which we know today, and that’s the first time the “UC Davis Aggies” became reality.
If you’ve seen the UC Davis logo (the modern one; not the classic “Cal Aggies” one), you know that it features a horse. That horse is a mustang named Gunrock, whose presence dates back to the school’s roots as a four-year institution. A costumed version of him is now the school’s mascot.
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