BYU is turning 150 this coming Thursday. Exactly a century and a half ago, on Oct. 16, 1875, the deed of trust was signed for the founding of Brigham Young Academy. The first classes began 2½ months later, in January 1876.
To celebrate turning a century and a half, without interruption, BYU is throwing a yearlong party. All over campus, you’ll find displays, signs and banners shouting “happy birthday.” South of the administration building, for example, the grounds department has spelled out “150” in a huge arrangement of plants.
But you’ll find no better context for what it means for BYU to turn 150, and what’s gone into getting here, than on the bottom floor of the Harold B. Lee Library, where an exhibit five years in the making lays out a quintessential timeline of BYU history.
The architects of the exhibit are library archivists Gordon Daines and Cory Nimer. The men spent years noodling on what to put in and what to leave out. “The space we have is limited, so we had to be very selective,” says Daines.
Decade by decade, the timeline highlights significant milestones for an institution that started out with 70 students and a faculty paid mostly in “turnips, molasses and pumpkins,” and in 2025 boasts more than 35,000 students and nearly 2,000 faculty members, including part timers, paid mostly in cash.
Located in a room adjacent to the library’s special collections gallery, “By Study and by Faith, 150 years of Brigham Young University” opened at the start of the school year and will continue to the end of the school year.
This, says Daines with a smile, “is how archivists party.”
The timeline laid out by Daines and Nimer shows that getting from then to now has been very much a work in progress. Not everything happened at once.
It was 28 years before the name of the school was changed from Brigham Young Academy to Brigham Young University (in 1903), for instance, and another 25 years after that before the school was recognized as an actual university when BYU gained accreditation by the Association of American Universities.
The first centralized library? Not until 1925. The first college of religious education? Not until 1930.
Sports teams representing the university came earlier: baseball in 1891, football in 1896 (the sport was discontinued three years later, because, per Daines, “there had been some deaths in the sport, although not on the BYU team.” Football resumed in 1922); and basketball in 1903.
The Y on the mountain east of campus was placed there in 1906.
The first structure on Temple Hill — today’s campus — was the Karl Maeser Building, erected in 1911 (today, there are over 300 buildings on the hill).
“Cougars” became the school mascot in 1923. That led to the student body adopting two live cougars in 1924, named Cleo and Tarbo. Their picture is displayed on Daines and Nimer’s timeline, but not the story Daines tells in an aside: “Apparently, someone took Cleo and Tarbo to a dance and they got loose. Nobody died. Or at least we couldn’t find any mention of it in the newspapers.”
Cosmo, the much safer human Cougar, suited up in 1953.
The BYU honor code didn’t appear until the 1948-49 school year — 75 years after the school began.
Daines and Nimer explain that it was instituted at the suggestion of returning World War II veterans who felt a code of honor would help dissuade students from cheating on tests.
The 22,700-seat (now 17,978-seat) Marriott Center opened in 1971. LaVell Edwards became head football coach in 1972. The Reuben J. Clark Law School started with its charter class in 1973. All of the foregoing set the stage for the myriad milestones and accomplishments of the more recent modern history.
For Daines, doing the timeline “reminded me what a unique place this is, and it reminded me that God is in the details of everything. To me, that’s really what this university is about. It’s about showing that the sacred and the secular are two sides of the same coin, that they belong together, and that, in many ways, a secular learning is enhanced by the sacred.”
Daines and Nimer invite one and all to come by the library and check it out. “You don’t have to whisper, you can talk normal,” adds Daines. Admission is free.
