Josiah Bushnell Grinnell, a native of Vermont, received Horace Greeley’s famous advice, “Go West, young man, go West,” and in 1854 founded the city that bears his name. A leader in state government, he chaired the legislative committee in 1857 that planned Iowa’s system of public education from the elementary through university level. An opponent of slavery, he sheltered John Brown in 1859 after Brown’s anti-slavery raids in Kansas and Missouri, and he made his community a stop on the Underground Railroad, with about 1,000 freed slaves passing through in the years before the Civil War. After a devastating tornado in 1882 and a fire that destroyed much of the business district in 1889, he led rebuilding efforts that renewed the community. The city is home to Grinnell College, founded as Iowa College in 1846 and moved to Grinnell in 1856; it was the first institution west of the Mississippi River to grant a bachelor’s degree and the first college in the country to have an undergraduate department of political science. In 1889 it was the site of the first intercollegiate football game played west of the Mississippi River, in which Grinnell defeated the University of Iowa 24-0. Its students included Harry Hopkins ’12, chief aide to President Franklin D. Roosevelt; James Norman Hall ’10, co-author of Mutiny on the Bounty; writer Ruth Suckow ’14; actor Gary Cooper ’26; Olympic gold medalist Morgan Taylor ’26; and Robert Noyce ’49, inventor of the process that made the microchip and helped launch the modern electronics revolution. Another resident was Arthur W. Radford, a World War II admiral and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1953 to 1957. Grinnell also has many notable examples of nineteenth-century residential, commercial, and institutional architecture, including several structures on the National Register of Historic Places; its most notable building is the Brenton National Bank of Poweshiek County, originally the Merchants National Bank of Grinnell, built in 1914 and designed by Louis Sullivan as a nationally recognized example of Prairie School architecture.