The man
Chester N. James was a schoolteacher who could not make a living at it. He was born in Stafford Springs, Connecticut in 1836, came west by way of Wisconsin, and by 1861 was teaching at Mound City, Kansas for about five dollars a month. He gave it up. He kept books for a wholesale grocer, clerked at a bank, and went into merchandising at Council Grove.
In the spring of 1868 he reached Butler County, bought a claim relinquishment for forty dollars, and in July opened a two-storey trading post built of hand-hewn cottonwood logs cut from the Walnut River. It stood alone on the prairie until the following spring. He named the town for his wife, Augusta.
The building
Within its first two years, that one building was the town’s store, its post office, its school, its church, its Sunday school, its election-day polling place, and the first Masonic lodge in the county. Chester James was its first Worshipful Master.
The school met on the second floor. The first teacher was L. N. Blood, a clerk in James’s own store, and roughly forty pupils sat at a slab desk fixed to the wall on wooden brackets, facing outward.
This log cabin housed the store of C.N. James, Post Office, Masonic Lodge, Baptist and Methodist Services and Public School taught by L.N. Blood.
Augusta Historical Society, on-site marker
The cabin still stands on its original site at Augusta, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1973, bought and restored by the Augusta Historical Society in 1939 for three hundred and fifty dollars.
Why we took the name
Because the teacher who could not afford to teach built the room the teaching happened in. That is the whole idea of this Institute, and it was done here first, in 1868, with no software at all.
We are not the trading post and we make no claim on it. The Augusta Historical Society owns and maintains the building, and the history above is theirs and the county’s, not ours.
What we are, and are not
The Institute is a guild: a private association that confers standing on its members. We are not accredited, we award no degrees, no academic credit, no certificates, and no diplomas, and we are not pursuing any of that. It is a deliberate choice, not a stage we are passing through.
What we do instead is teach the seven liberal arts and prepare members for examinations that other people administer and other institutions honour. When a member wants portable proof, it comes from College Board, from Prometric, or from the Kansas Board of Regents. Never from us.
Open to everyone
Any adult may join, from anywhere, regardless of sex, gender identity or expression, race, colour, national or ethnic origin, religion, age, disability, or sexual orientation, and regardless of whether anyone in your family ever finished school. There is no application, so there is nothing to fail.
A note on accuracy
Several things commonly said about C. N. James are wrong, and we would rather be right than romantic. He did not live out his life in Augusta: he moved to El Dorado around 1875 as Clerk of the District Court, went to California for his health, and died there in 1884. He is not buried in Kansas. The trading post was never a courthouse, a land office, or a hotel. And there is no known direct quotation from him anywhere in the county histories, so we do not put words in his mouth.