Does that include the mass awards during the Civil War? If not, that is impressive.

I'm not sure about Texas A&M, but Virginia Tech was not founded until after the Civil War, so no, it would not include any Civil War vets.

The VT website actually lists the winners.

The earliest was a student from 1889.

I'd expect Texas A&M to also have been founded a few decades after the Civil War. As I understand it, through the Civil War, the only colleges teaching engineering were the military acadamies, and no one at all taught agricultural science. The only jobs that you could specifically train for in a civilian college were law, medicine, preaching, and teaching. (Otherwise, the college degree served as credentials that you were a polished gentleman from a family rich enough to afford useless learning - as liberal arts degrees still do.)

A few decades after the Civil War, Congress finally noticed that more knowledge made better farmers, and that well-educated engineers were needed for more than just building forts and blowing them up. So they started a program of endowing colleges of agriculture and "mechanical arts" (engineering), one per state, mostly financed by giving federal lands to the new colleges. I'd be surprised if A&M wasn't one of these.