A manual labor college was a type of school in the United States, primarily between 1825 and 1860, in which work, usually agricultural or mechanical, supplemented academic activity.
The manual labor model was intended to make educational opportunities more widely available to students with limited means, and to make the schools more viable economically. The work was seen as morally beneficial as well as healthful; at the time, this was innovative and egalitarian thinking.
The inventive power, which is a modification of the same principle [of suggestion], is greatly invigorated by that healthful energy of the circulation, which is produced by bodily exercise.[1]: 32 ...The law of connection between the healthful, vigorous and locomotive powers of the muscular system, and the state of the affections and operations of the mind, has not yet been sufficiently investigated. Facts show its existence and importance.[1]: 45
According to the trustees of the Lane Seminary:
[I]t is to the directors no longer a matter of experiment, but of sober fact, resulting from three or four years experience, that the connexion of three hours daily labor in some useful and interesting employment, with study, protects the health and constitution of our young men; greatly augments their physical energy; furnishes to a considerable extent or entirely, the means of self-education; increases their power of intellectual acquisition; facilitates their actual progress in study; removes the temptation of idleness; confirms their habit of industry; gives them a practical acquaintance with the useful employments of life; fits them for the toils and responsabilities of a new-settled country; and inspires them with the independence of character, and the originality of investigation, which belong peculiarly to self-made and self-educated men.... At the close of the session the students, instead of feeling worn out by their efforts, exhibited as much intellectual and physical energy, and as great an elasticity as is usually found in literary institutions at the beginning of a term.[2]
These "colleges" usually included what we would today (2019) call high school ("preparatory") as well as college-level instruction. At the time, the only public schools were at the elementary level, and there were no rules distinguishing colleges from high schools.
The four states with the largest number of such schools were New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.[3]: 76