University of Missouri-Columbia

University of Missouri-Columbia is on Eighth St., 3 blks. s. of Broadway St. “Mizzou,” the oldest state university west of the Mississippi, has 30,000 students and 1,700 faculty and staff members. The 1,358-acre campus features a number of historic buildings. Six Ionic columns on Francis Quadrangle are all that remains of Academic Hall, destroyed by fire in 1892. Thomas Jefferson's original tombstone is on the quadrangle. With more than 5,000 trees and 650 varieties of plants, the MU grounds have been officially designated as a botanic garden.

In the lobby of the Electrical Engineering Building on Sixth Street is Thomas Edison's restored dynamo, used on the campus for the first demonstration of incandescent lighting west of the Mississippi.

The Geology Building has more than 100,000 fossil and rock specimens, many displayed in its ground and first-floor corridors. A collection of mounted waterfowl is exhibited in the corridors of Lefevre Hall on University Avenue.