The Barton gift

Southeast Missouri State University has received its largest single donation ever, a gift of 850 acres of New Madrid County farmland valued at almost $4 million. The gift, from alumna June Barton of Catron, Mo., was made in memory of her husband, Donald M. Barton, who died in 1987. Proceeds from the gift will benefit students in the Department of Agriculture and the university's research farm south of Gordonville. The farm has been renamed the Donal M. Barton Agriculture Research Center.

The research center is one of several facilities in which the Department of Agriculture is involved, all of which give the department's 100-plus students opportunities for hands-on experience. The 252-acre research farm is a beef and row-crop operation. In addition, the university has greenhouses and turf-research plots. And it is a partner with the University of Missouri and the Rice Research Council in a rice research farm at Malden, Mo. The department has more than a dozen faculty members and staff.

Half of the Barton donation will be go into an endowment for scholarships for ag students, and the other half will be used for upkeep and improvements at the research farm.

Like other gifts that have given a tremendous boost to the university's facilities and programs -- the Harry L. Crisp donation to the Bootheel Education Center in Malden and the B.W. Harrison gift to the River Campus, for example -- the Barton donation will go a long way toward making Southeast a premiere institution of higher learning.