Several private colleges were opened prior to 1889, and the Enabling Act of that year provided for the establishment of an agricultural college and normal schools. Like the other private institutions, Jamestown College was forced to close its doors during the financial panic of 1893. Reopened in 1909, it is now the only endowed liberal arts college in the State. The effects of the 1893 depression on the university and normal schools were accentuated by the vetoing of the appropriations for a two-year period. Weathering this crisis, the State colleges and university reached an enrollment of 2,000 in 1904, and by 1936 their total registration exceeded 10,000. Notable in educational history was the affiliation in 1905 of the university and Wesley College, a Methodist school originally located at Wahpeton. Similar affiliations were later made among other colleges, including the North Dakota Agricultural College, where the Wesley College buildings are now used for an interdenominational school of religion. To comply with the provision of the Enabling Act requiring establishment and maintenance of a public school system open to all children and free from sectarian control, the first legislature set up an education department administered by three branches--a State superintendent, county superintendents, and district boards. It also created a tuition fund from the proceeds of school lands, supplemented by poll taxes, school taxes levied by general law, and all fines for violation of State statutes. The money from these sources was made available to all schools in which the English language was taught. The school lands to which the law referred were received by the State in accordance with the plan of the Federal act of 1785 granting each new State carved from the Ohio Territory section 16 of each township for public school support. For North and South Dakota, under the Enabling Act, this grant was doubled, giving the schools one-eighteenth of all land surveyed. Town site boomers and speculators in other States commonly took advantage of school land grants to buy property at prices far below the actual value; but in the Dakotas they were forestalled by the alert Territorial superintendent of schools, W. H. H. Beadle, who incorporated into the constitutions of both States the provision that school lands might not be sold at less than $10 an acre, and might be leased as hay or grazing lands but not for cultivation, and that the title of western coal lands included in the grant must always be retained by the State. Similarly guarded were 750,000 acres of land granted to other educational institutions. So successful was Beadle's plan that it has been adopted by almost every other State admitted to the Union since 1889.