Harvard University: Cambridge Hanardsquare MEMORIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY CAMBRIDGE BY LOIS LILLEY HOWE (1864-1964) Read January 22, 1952 ONE of my earliest recollections - I cannot date it - is that I asked some older member of my family if it was probable that I should be alive when 1900, the new century, came in. I never imagined that I should live for more than fifty years in that century. My memories of my early years in the nineteenth seem to be as if I lived in a different world. was born in a college town where life was as simple as life in a village. The professors and instructors in the college were all friends. Very few people had horses and carriages; the horse cars were sufficiently convenient. The house where I was born was old-fashioned, with very little essential so-called modern plumbing. There was no pantry sink in what we called the "china closet," but there was a butler's tray in which a dishpan could be put for the "second girl" to wash dishes. My mother washed the breakfast cups and the silver in a dishpan on the diningroom table after breakfast. The kitchen sink was a large, low soapstone affair something like a glorified horse trough. There was a double-oven range, in front of which meat was rosted in a "tin kitchen" - much more delicious than a roast baked in an oven. This range also heated a large boiler, so that there was always plenty of hot water, for we had set basins and hot and cold water in many bedrooms. The kitchen chimney must have been very old, for on the other side of it, in the so-called "wash room," was a Dutch oven and beside it a huge built-in copper wash boiler to boil the clothes which were washed in old-fashioned wooden tubs. There was also a wonderful drying room opening out of this wash room, or back kitchen, which could be used in winter or in stormy weather. It was a marvellous place to play in, having frames of wooden bars which ran on rails and which could be pulled out when desired. It was heated by a little stove in the cellar. 59 Beyond this wash room a passage led to a long ell between house and barn. In this was the study, built for James Russell Lowell when he became Professor of Belles Lettres and lived with my father and mother before his second marriage. It proved very useful for several generations of students later It had an outside door and a chimney and a soap-stone Franklin stove which did not wholly mitigate the winter climate. Beyond was a shed with slatted blind doors and then the stable, called a barn, making a courtyard, in the middle of which was a magnificent elm tree. Cambridge Historical Souety Proceeding 34 (1952) : 68-75 I can just remember when there were horses but they had been given up and all that remained of that glory was a fine old carriage in which I used to play - and, in the second story, the empty hayloft and a pigeon house which my brother and his friends converted into a club room. Later I had a studio in the summer here. We kept a cow for many years. The first one I remember was a Kerry cow, something like a bovine Dachshund, long and low. She once got stuck in a ditch on the edge of the woods not far away. Her successor was a wanderer, always getting out of her pasture up the street. So she had on one horn a large wooden tag marked "E. Howe." Of course, the cow had to be milked and the man who milked her and took her out to pasture in the summer also took care of the furnace and blacked my father's boots. These were tall high boots pulled on with considerable difficulty with boot hooks. The tops were concealed by his trousers. The process of pulling the boots on was usually done after breakfast in the diningroom. There was also a boot jack to take them off which was kept in a closet in the back hall. The milk was put into wide, shallow milk pans and kept in what was known as the "milk cellar," a room in the cellar with a cupboard which opened into a well close to the north wall of the house. This "milk room" was paved with brick and had a sort of grave in the centre with a trap door, to keep extra ice. There used to be a barrel of soft soap in the cellar, too, but I have no knowledge of the mystery of its being made. And there was always a large salt cod fish hanging up somewhere, ready for use for Saturday's dinner of boiled salt cod and mashed potato - and, of course, anyone could pinch off flakes of salt cod and eat them. When I became old enough to take responsibility [sic.] I used to lock up 60 at night. There were six or seven doors to be fastened, all with bolts. Of course, that did not count the bulkhead door from the cellar to the yard - just right to slide down! It was a very inconvenient house in many ways, needing much domestic help. There was a long hall between the kitchen and diningroom but there was a slide which opened into the china closet. In the corner of the house was the "inner china closet" in which jellies and preserves were kept. What visions this calls up of preserve and jelly making! My mother would have scorned canned fruit! Back of the inner china closet and opening from the back hall opposite the kitchen door was a large storeroom with shelves all around it. On the top shelf I remember a row of empty blue and white ginger jars. There was a marble slab on which to make pastry, and during some period of financial flush I remember the building of a large refrigerator between the storeroom and the inner china closet. The ice man climbed up several steps in the storeroom and put the ice in. This refrigerated a large cupboard in the other closet with many shelves. It was the most modern thing in the house! The furnace was quite inadequate but there were several handsome round registers on the first floor and one register in the second, and there were fireplaces in the bedrooms. In the third story, the upper hall, lighted by a sky-light was very fascinating and there was a wonderful and unusually large rocking-horse there. One little room with its own sky-light bore upon the door a large sign "Oxford Museum," but the collections were not very interesting - a few desiccated butterflies, some birds' eggs, lucky stones and shells. I used the room for a work room for many purposes of my own. The two parlors were very handsome and had windows in embrasures with shutters. The only thing I never liked was the staircase - straight and uncompromising, somewhat commonplace but not pretentious. Probably if I were altering the house now I should leave it alone. But I always longed for a handsome staircase like that in the Batchelders' house next door and I worked out in my mind how it could have a turn near the bottom and how there would be headroom for the change. This idea had a curious effect on my life afterward. There was about an acre of land which provided much entertainment. There were two more wells, relics of an old farm house. Neither 61 could be investigated but one had a hole under the flagstone top through which a stone could be poked, affording the noise of a good subterranean plunk. On the south side of the house there was a swing between two trees and a ladder like a fruit-picking ladder up which you carried the rope, then put your foot in the loop and swung off. There was great competition as to the highest rung to swing from. This was near a lawn, called the croquet ground, which made a very small tennis court later. To the north of that was the clothes yard and a group of pine trees known as the playground. Beyond was the garden - a real garden, an old-fashioned box parterre with, on either side of it, vegetable gardens and currant bushes. (Financial helps - five cents a hundred for picking off currant worms!) There were also pear trees and grape vines. The Batchelders' yard next door had more climbable trees, as I learned when they had a young cousin from Baltimore visiting them. The house I was born in is still standing on the corner of Oxford and Kirkland Streets, for this town I speak of was Old Cambridge, Massachusetts, as I knew it in the '70's and '80's. The house has been modernized - we called it Number 1 Oxford Street - and the lovely garden vanished long ago. The so-called playground was seldom used as such except on the triennial visits of my married sister who lived in Ohio. Her oldest daughter was a year older than I, so my nieces and nephews were contemporaries. Their visits were memorable. Sometimes we were taken for the day in an open carriage to Chelsea Beach, a big lonely beach of which I wish I could remember more. The world knows it now as Revere Beach. But that playground was the place where my brother, four years older than I, celebrated the holidays - Fast Day, the first Thursday in April, Bunker Hill Day, the Seventeenth of June, and the Fourth of July. I had to be content with little packages of torpedoes but he not only had firecrackers but a little cannon (in stage language "a practical cannon") and powder. What he did with this was to shoot the dentist in effigy, the effigy being made of old magazines and the ammunition of old dental instruments. I suppose he must have wearied of this and so he took down the empty ginger jars of which I have spoken and demolished them. My mother was much displeased. I have often won- 62 dered if any of them was like the one Frank Bigelow found which was worth $2,000.00. I can just remember when there was a long low building on the Delta across Kirkland Street. This was the foundation of Memorial Hall and I was always absorbingly interested in its construction. After the hall was built there was at its east end a deep sandpit in which I sometimes played, looking up the high straight wall to the top of the tower. In this pit was built the cellar of Sanders Theatre. While the theatre was being built I clambered all over it and the workmen called me "the little superintendent." But the first thing that I remember of what happened in the outside world was that there was a great fire in Chicago. This was stamped on my mind by the fact that one of my cousins was "burned out." He brought his family to my uncle's in Cambridge and I was taken to meet the three little cousins I had never seen. This meeting was a great disappointment to me from which I never fully recovered, though I never told anyone about it. I peered anxiously under their chairs but their shoes and stockings were all whole. I had supposed, of course, they would have holes burnt in them. It was a year later, on a Sunday morning in November, 1872, when I was eight years old, that my brother came into my nursery and pointed to a lurid glare in the sky. "That," he ofi72 said, ""is the big fire in Boston that started last night and is still burning!" My father was ill at the time and his office was in a building in the path of the flames It was proposed to Fire blow up that building and the key of his safe could not be found. Even the small child of eight felt the anxiety of the family. Fortunately it was decided not to blow up the building. There was at the time an epidemic known as the epizootic which had attacked all the horses. The Cambridge fire engine was dragged in by Harvard students, who, you may be sure, did many deeds of derring-do. There was a group of young cousins in college at that time and they had many stories to tell. I was never taken to see the burned district, which stretched from Washington Street down to the harbor. Of course, my brother and his friends explored it and he brought home a large chunk of melted-up cups and saucers he had found in the ruins. This was one of the chief exhibits in the "Oxford Museum." 63 I cannot remember how old I was when I saw for the first time a silver quarter of a dollar. I was used to paper ones like small one-dollar bills. This beautiful coin was shown me by the father of a little girl with whom I was playing. The encyclopedia says that, after the Civil War, specie payments were resumed in 1879, but I saw that silver quarter some years before that. I remember also the large copper two-cent pieces and the small three-cent pieces of silver. My father's sister, my Aunt Mary Howe, taught me to read. I cannot remember when this was, only I used to set my dolls in a row and teach them to spell from an old primer I had. Sometime when I was about five or six years old I began to go to school to Miss Mary Olmsted. Kindergartens had not been invented and I cannot remember what we studied or learned except that we worked mottes on perforated cardboard. I may have learned the multiplication table and the difference between Roman and Arabic numerals. We certainly stood up in class to recite something. (1826-96) This school was held in the diningroom of the house of Professor Francis J. Child. We used the diningroom chairs as desks and sat on footstools in front of them. We helped Miss Olmsted, whom we adored, to put away books (what books, I wonder?) under the serving table when school was over. No servants or families escorted us to school. My cousin Agnes Devens, Mattie Sever, Winnie Howells, daughter of William Dean Howells, and I walked to school together and there met Helen Child, her two younger sisters, Susan and Henrietta, and Florence Farrar and Edith Cushman. It is something to remember, Mr. Francis J. Child working in his rose garden! There were no new houses on Kirkland Street. We knew who lived in every one. On Kirkland Place where Miss Fowler's garden now is was Peirce's Pond where we learned to skate and where there were goldfish in the summer. I went to catch some once and Professor Peirce came out to catch me but I stood my ground (what I had to stand on), and when he found I was the daughter of a very old friend he forgave me. Francis Avenue was a private drive up to the Munroes' house somewhere near where Bryant Street now is. There was an open field from there to Kirkland Street. About opposite this when I first went to school were the blackened ruins of Parkman Shaw's house which had 64 burned down one summer night, all the neighbors coming to help. Irving Street did not cross Kirkland Street. Between it and Trow-bridge Street was a lovely bit of woodland where we could pick wild flowers in the spring. The driveway to the Nortons' house came about where the northern part of Irving Street now comes. The Norton girls did not come to school with us; in fact, they did not come home from Europe for a good while after I began to go to school. However, we soon became old friends. It was pleasant to walk up between the Childs' house and the house of Miss Ashburner and over the fields to Shady Hill. Somehow, my memories always seem to be of spring and summer. We always had a May Day festival. But when I speak of the Norton place I remember being allowed to go coasting down from the front of their house on a winter evening. A big boy named Will Winlock had a double-runner - a big board carried on two sleds. This preceded the toboggan and we thought it much fun. Norton's woods were real woods with a trail through them. I'm more apt to think of approaching them the other way, through Divinity Avenue. Back of Divinity Hall was an open field that led to Norton's Pond, a dark pool with a brook running through it and a board fence on the Norton side of the brook. A plank walk crossed the brook on one side and led to a hole in the fence. This pond must have been somewhere near where Bryant, Irving, and Scott Streets now lie. This was easily reached from Oxford Street - or from the Severs' house on Fris-bie Place, the yard of which ran through to Divinity Avenue. This was one of my favorite playgrounds. I was so much younger than anyone else in my family that I was rather a lonely child. There were the three Sever children, Mattie, my sworn friend, and her brothers, George and Frank. Then there was the Agassiz Museum to visit. We were always allowed to go there and nobody knew the rites we performed - quite gently - with tails and noses of those skeletons of prehistoric animals which are probably now discarded. Also I had to superintend the building of the Peabody Museum. My aunt, Mrs. Arthur Lithgow Devens, lived on the corner of Oxford and Everett Streets, close by Jarvis Field. We could watch baseball games on the field from her windows. Near Jarvis Field was a huge and 65 terrifying old willow in a place always called uThe Ditch. I have no doubt it was one of the last remains of the original "Palisade." My aunt's younger daughter, Agnes, was only a little younger than I and we naturally did many things together, but I was more interested in the Severs. I have been told that I once said, "Aggie and I are very different. We have different views." Which was very true. we went to Miss Olmsted's School together and when Miss Olmsted married we both went to Miss Sarah Page's School on Everett Street - next door to my aunt's. Here was a real school for girls and boys and real work - history, geography, drawing maps - how I loved that! - long sums of "Partial Payments" on my slate, French lessons from Madam Harney, learning to repeat poetry. used to be furious with the pupils who could never get anything to repeat beyond "Old (Ironsides at anchor lay" and Tennyson's "Brook" (which they seemed to emulate, going on forever), both of which they found in the third reader. So I hunted up poems at home. I ought to have consulted my sister Clara, who would have given the best advice. But I only remember one piece of poetry that I learned and that I have never forgotten, though I still harbor a grudge against the young teacher who was amused at me. I imagine I 'was funny at twelve years old declaiming "How well Horatius kept the bridge in the brave days of old." Our parents thought it wise for "Aggie" and "Lolo" to go on Sunday afternoons to see Cousin Mary Howard. Poor Cousin Mary, I have her sampler, made in 1792, but when I knew her she was blind and really poor. She was a cousin of my grandmother's who had fallen upon evil days and was a beneficiary of some fund for aged women. She was nearly one hundred years old. She used to tell us how her father had held her up to see General George Washington when he came to Boston in 1790. I do not think there are many people now living who can remember anyone who saw George Washington. I used to say that that was my greatest event. My sister Clara had been held in William Makepeace Thackeray's arms when Uncle James Lowell brought him to our house when she was a baby. But my sister Sally had the most wonderful thing to tell. She had been to a reception at the White House and had shaken hands with Abraham Lincoln. Agnes and Mattie and I all went to Sunday School together, too, and 66 we were in Miss Edith Longfellow's class. Of course, we adored her and felt very sad to have her marry and leave us. She was married January 6, 1878. I take the date from a little New Testament with my initials on it in gold. She gave us each one, and more than that, all through that December when she was getting ready to be married she had our class come once a week in the afternoon and make scrapbooks for poor children. I seem to remember we worked in the southeast room on the second floor of Craigie House. The spring after she was married she had us come to Boston and spend the day with her and go to ride on the Public Garden swan boats. Three years at Miss Page's fitted me for the Cambridge High School. I had to take examinations for entrance. That was in June and must have been 1877. They were held in the old Harvard Grammar School, a wooden building long since demolished, on Harvard Street somewhere beyond Prospect Street. I walked down there by myself every morning for three days, and I never shall forget what a pretty street Harvard Street was then. Then I began to go down to the High School on the corner of Broadway and Fayette Street. Where the Rindge School, the Library, and the other schools are were open fields. I do not believe the modern high schools in this part of the world begin their first course with English History - a review for me, as was also reading "The Lady of the Lake." But Latin was new and so was algebra - and the minus sign still has an unpleasant effect on me. It must have been about this time that my oldest brother said at dinner one day, "I see that man Bell, who married Mabel Hubbard [the daughter of our neighbor, Gardiner Greene Hubbard] has patented that invention of his which he claims will make it possible for people to talk to each other at a distance." "Yes," said my father, "it may be very useful if it proves to be practical." I have been told that Mr. Hubbard afterwards became bankrupt and his creditors allowed him to keep a lot of worthless stock he had taken in his son-in-law's invention. Electricity was still in its youth. Very little was known about it, but scientists were working on it. In my second year at the Cambridge High School I was in a class in what was called "Natural Philosophy," a mild form of Physics. I seem to remember vaguely learning something about specific gravity and that water will rise to its highest level if confined, and something about 67 frictional electricity. I don't know why I have always remembered that we were told that if a wire with a strong electric current was cut or broken the current would for a few seconds continue to flow from one end of the break to the other. It would make a very brilliant light for a few instants and then its heat would burn off the ends of the wire. If any means could be found of preventing this destruction of the ends, this brilliant spark might be used to give light. On this theory the arc light was constructed, which was for a long time used for street lighting. Perhaps some of you remember collecting the broken scraps of carbon left by the linemen when they made repairs. More wonderful, however, was something which had been lent to the teacher to show us - a little glass ball with a wire burning and shining in it - the first incandescent bulb, just invented by a man named Thomas Edison. (I often wonder how the teacher electrified the wire.) Now you are not to suppose that electric light and telephone began at once to be of use. Mr. Edison's lamp was invented in 1879, the telephone several years earlier. In 1890, much scared, I made my first call on a telephone! And when we built our present house in 1887 we did not put in electric light - it was not cheap nor was it considered safe. Agnes did not go to the High School, and Mattie Sever did not go either there or to Miss Page's School. About this time her father inherited a house in Kingston and for several years I made a visit there every summer. This house is one of the finest old New England houses in existence and its beauty sank into my heart and mind at once - never to be forgotten. It was full of beautiful old furniture, too. Very few people in Cambridge went away for the whole summer but the Devens family always did, and after the Severs began to go too my summers were rather lonely, But there was a place where I often made a visit, this time with my mother. This was (Canton) Massachusetts. My grandmother's sister, whom I can just remember, married the son of Paul Revere. He had developed the Revere Copper Company on the grounds of which was the place where Paul Revere cast his bells. Here my real hostess was my father's cousin, Miss Maria Revere, just like a very dear aunt to me. We went by train to Canton Junction and from there took "the little car" which was like a hack on low wheels. This was drawn by a horse on a spur track which led to the "Works." From there we walked across T.W. Ward S.C Contor 68 residesce the Neponset River on a bridge and up the drive to the house. This was built on a side hill and the diningroom and kitchen were in the basement, but the diningroom door opened out into a grove of real forest trees. Breakfast and dinner were eaten there but supper was brought upstairs to "the little parlor" where it was eaten by candelight. There was neither gas nor electricity and to me it was marvellous and romantic. Then up the hill was where Cousin Maria's brother, Cousin John, lived with his family, which included Susie (now Mrs. Henry B. Chapin), about my own age, and her younger brother, Ned. What fun it all was and how interesting was the Copper Yard with its furnaces and machinery and in the middle a great barn, very necessary, but interesting mostly because it sheltered a donkey named "Peggy" and a donkey cart for our use. We used to drive up to the village and buy chocolate drops of Miss Chloe Dunbar, and to the paper box factory where were sold nests of boxes with pretty pictures on the covers. The little cousins who were burnt out in Chicago lived in Holyoke Place for a time and then in an apartment in Bulfinch Place in Boston - the first apartment I had ever seen with the first elevator I ever tried to run> Although only about twelve years old I was allowed to go into Boston by myself to spend Saturdays with them. The Broadway horse car took me to Bowdoin Square close to Bowdoin Street. There were other cars from Harvard Square up Main Street. A man came up to the car at Green Street with an extra horse which he hitched on to help pull the car up the hill! Shoppers generally disembarked at Temple Street and walked over the hill to Park Street past a frowning granite reservoir on the west side of the street. My father, who was one of the directors on the street railway, once told me that the long pile causeway and bridge, nearly a mile, where no fares changed, was a great liability. There was always the chance of the drawbridge being open to delay the passage, and there was that train crossing from the Boston and Albany which is still bothering surface cars. If we were going to the mountains or the north shore we took a car which went on Cambridge Street. For the first part of the way this was quite interesting. Between Baldwin Street and Inman Square on the north side of the street was Hovey's Nursery with a high board fence over the top of which were tantalizing glimpses of trees. Opposite were a number of very handsome and, to me, interesting houses. (Houses 69 always attracted me.) They had flat roofs and there were low brick garden walls along the street. The rest of the street was commonplace with an occasional dwelling house, but in Boston the cars arrived at a very slummy place and there were three stations close together on Causeway Street where the North Station is now - the Lowell, the Eastern, and the Fitchburg Stations. The Boston and Maine was in Haymarket Square. At the High School I was fitted for Harvard College and took the examinations for entrance. A group of ladies who were interested in the higher education of women had formed an organization which arranged that women could take the entrance examinations for Harvard and receive a certificate that they had done so. These ladies were the precursors of those who started Radcliffe. I think I was one of the very last girls who took the examinations under that organization and had my name in the College Catalogue. My "preliminaries" were taken up in a big room at the Botanical Garden in June with dear Mrs. Asa Gray bringing in lemonade for us. My finals were taken with the rest of the girls in my class (who almost all went to "The Annex" afterward) in the Garrets' house, now called "Founders House," on Appian Way. Those five years at the High School were filled with much pleasure, in which I was more interested than in the School. Though I pretended that I was sorry to leave school I realized that I was giving up something very precious in the friends I had made there. The old friends were never really forgotten, but new interests and broadening experience made new ones of greater importance. There was in Cambridge, on the other side of the Common, a set of girls that I never went to school with but whom I gradually came to see socially, and among them were Marion and Alice Muzzey. I was between them in age and I became very intimate with them in their house on Coolidge Hill with its yard going down to Mount Auburn Street. Alice was my dearest friend. Their father died about a year before mine did and they went to Buffalo to live with their brother. I visited them there twice and stopped on the way home in Auburn, New York, to see Agnes who had married Thomas Mott Osborne. I wrote a weekly letter to Alice from the time she left Cambridge for more than thirty years. The summer after I left school a cousin who was a chemist turned up. 70 Our house was always open to all sorts of relations and my mother was almost like a grandmother to all her nieces and nephews. This young man, aferwards an expert on concrete, had with him a camera and a tripod and "these new dry plates," and I have a photograph he took (very bad) of the whole family sitting on the lawn! Up to that time, and for many years afterward, it was tintypes that we had taken (when we could afford it). I have a funny collection - but how soft and pretty they are. I had no desire to go to college, but I felt I must do something. After family consultation with Mrs. Susan Nichols Carter, an old friend of the family and the head of the Art School at the Cooper Union in New York, I went to the school of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in September, 1882, to study drawing and painting and design. Here was a new life opened to me. In the first place, I had to go to Boston every day. A new route had been established; the cars did not all go to Bowdoin Square - some of them turned off and went through Charles Street to Park Square. Shoppers walked across the Common instead of over the hill. At Park Square was the Providence Station with its high clock tower where is now the Hotel Statler. There was a special car at 8:15 that ran on Broadway and was patronized by a number of very interesting people who taught in schools in Boston. There were Mr. John Hopkinson, who kept a very fashionable school for boys, Mr. Walter Deane one of his assistants, also Mr. Volkmann who afterward founded the Volkmann School, Miss Elizabeth Simmons, one of the most brilliant and interesting women I ever met, sometimes Miss Catherine Ireland in whose school she taught, and Miss von Seckendorff who taught German in that same school - and afterwards gave me private lessons in German. French I had had at Miss Page's and also rather casually in High School. For company near my own age was Fanny Ames, now Mrs. Mallinson Randall, younger than I but never to be forgotten, going in to Aliss Ireland's. I left the car at Boylston Street, a street then composed almost entirely of houses in which "nice" people lived. There were the two hotels, Hotel Berkeley and Hotel Brunswick, but on the corner of Berkeley Street opposite Hotel Berkeley was the very handsome building of the Young Men's Christian Association. Of course, on the other side of Boylston Street were the Natural History Museum, the Rogers Build- 71 ing of the Institute of Technology, and the Walker Building. I think the latter was not there in 1882. 1 think the Lowell Institute of Design had a small low wooden building there. My idea was to go to that later but I came to scorn it. Trinity Church was just built, and where the Sheraton Plaza now stands was the Art Museum. In front of it was a dump. Where the Public Library now stands were two thin city houses with marble fronts. Horse cars, blue and green ones, ran up Boylston Street and all around the square to Dartmouth Street and then through and out Marlborough Street. The school was in the basement of the Museum and in the attic, where was the life class, and also in a lecture room up a winding staircase among the skylights. Beginners, after learning in the basement to draw very large hands and ears and eyes, were promoted to work in the galleries of the first floor, where most of the objects of interest were casts of famous statues. There were two instructors, Mr. Otto Grundmann, imported from Europe, and Mr. Frederick Crowninshield, who had a brick studio in the back yard where he made stained glass windows. He was much more interested in the students than Mr. Grundmann and did a great deal for them. He had had a class in History of Decoration and this class had become so interested in Egyptian art that they had with their own hands decorated in the Egyptian manner a room in the basement which was used as a lunch room. Here a woman came every day and served hot cocoa for a small sum. Every day I brought in bread and butter and a raw potato. On the latter I cut my initials and she baked it for me. Of course, we all had special seats at the long tables. I sat with my classmates, called by Mr. Crowninshield "Infants." I made a group of friends and we had many merry times together - always dashing out to Trinity Church to weddings when we saw the awnings out. It was probably Mr. Crowninshield who engineered having Mr. - afterward Sir - Hubert Herkimer come and speak to us. He was a distinguished English artist. I can't remember anything he said except that a new process had been discovered by which drawings and photographs could be cheaply reproduced, and it was possible that we might at some time be able to have illustrations in our morning papers. He never imagined that they would be telegraphed around the world. 72 I found that Mr. Crowninshield had arranged for a summer school in Richmond, Massachusetts. It had had one or two sessions and it seemed to me it was very important for me to go. So it proved, though not in the way I expected. My family consented, and although my brother had died early in June after a long illness, I started off under the patronage of two elderly ladies - at least I considered them elderly. They must have been between forty and fifty! I thought them too old to paint. Never shall I forget that journey through the valley of the Westfield River! Ayong drive over the hills from the Richmond railroad station to "Kenmore" brought us to the old house which Mr. Crowninshield had found, It was and is a remarkably fine eighteenth-century house with a wide hall and grand staircase. Two of the four rooms on the first floor were furnished as parlors with straw cushions. All the other rooms were dormitories, in one of which at the back I was quartered with some of the older ladies and Alice Hinds, who was not only one of the important older students of the school but Mr. Crowninshield's assistant in his studio. She it was who was keeping house, and another older student, William Stone (familiarly known as Billy Rocks) took care of the very necessary horse and wagon; for we were many, many miles from everything except a farm house directly across the road where were two diningrooms and a kitchen and some domestic help. was rather disappointed not to be put at the dining table with the younger members of the party but placed with the old ladies. However, with them were Dr. and Mrs. Edward Emerson of Concord and their children, and that certainly was a privilege. He was the son of Ralph Waldo Emerson and was desirous of giving up his chosen medical profession for that of artist. There were only two "Infants" besides myself and those not well known to me. The other students besides the "old ladies" were from the very upper class at the school. Among others were Frank Benson of Salem and Joseph Lindon Smith, both headed for Paris, and I some other young men. began to realize that there were many respectable and socially agreeable young men to whom Harvard College was no attraction. The queens of the whole establishment were Helen Hinds (Alice's sister), May Hallowell of West Medford, and Lizzie Schuster of Brattle- 73 boro. They had some secret plan of a play they were to give. There were murmurs of it but it never came off. I was odd man out and belonged with nobody but did not seem to mind it, except that they were planning to have a dance on Fourth of July. They had a piano, though no other furniture except beds. My brother had died so recently that I felt as if I could not go to that dance, but I could not think how to get out of going. On the Fourth of July someone put up a hammock and Helen Hinds got into it and began to swing. Out came a staple and down she fell and banged her head badly. Dr. Emerson said it was only a slight concussion but she must keep quiet for several days, and neither she nor the girls who shared her room could go to the dance. Of course, these two girls wanted to go, and so Helen's sister was expected to give up her bed to one of the other girls and I offered to give up mine. It was such an opportunity for me! Not much to do, was it? The result was that I not only ceased to be a nonentity but, because I was considered so unselfish, I was taken up by the most desirable girls in the community and formed friendships for life. Two of those "girls," now over ninety are still my intimate friends. In my last two years at the Museum School I was in a new department, the Decoration Class. Here we had an architect, C. Howard Walker, for a teacher - one of the most interesting and inspiring. He had travelled extensively in Europe and he put at our disposal all his photographs and sketches. Another door opened wide. I began to feel that I wanted to be either an illustrator or an architect. I was told that if I learned to draw and paint I could easily become an illustrator, but as a woman I could not be an architect. Mr. Walker said I should have to learn to swear and that most of the time I should think my occupation tedious. After four years at the Museum School I tried doing some work at home for a year. My father had been ill a long time and he died in January. He wished my mother to sell our house and the land and build a smaller house somewhere. We were fortunate enough to sell the house at once to the Reverend Francis G. Peabody. (It is now known as the Peabody House.) Of course, his brother Robert, a very distinguished architect, superintended the remodelling of it. Mrs. Peabody felt as I did about the staircase and 74 wanted to have it turned. He said it could not be done and she said Miss Lois Howe had said it could be. He found I was right - so he always was interested in me! It was heartbreaking to leave the house and very difficult to find a location for a new one, but we suddenly heard that Mr. Charles Choate was giving up his place on the corner of Brattle and Appleton Streets and we were able to buy the asparagus bed. My aunt, Mrs. Devens, sold her house on Everett Street and bought the corner lot next to us. Cabot and Chandler were the architects of our house and I spent every minute that I could in it while it was being built and then said, "This is what I want to do!" So I went to see President Walker of the Tech and asked him if I could come into Tech on a six years' certificate of entrance to Harvard College, to which he agreed) Lewis Carroll's book "Sylvy and Bruno" came out about that time with its fascinating jingles which we were all imitating, and one of my friends wrote this: I thought I saw an architect Climb up the Tech's high stairs. I looked again and found it was A lamb midst crowds of bears. Poor thing! I said. Poor lonely thing, I wonder how she dares! And I was the only girl in a class of sixty-five men and one of two girls in a drafting room of ninety. The other girl, Sophia G. Hayden, was ahead of me in class. She never did anything for me, but Mr. Francis H. Chandler, the architect of our house, became the new head of the Department of Architecture and that was a help. I had just begun to go to Tech when our neighbor, Miss Mary Blatch-ford, came to call. When she heard what I was doing she said her nephew, Gardiner Scudder, was going there, that he walked over to Allston and took the train in every morning. She was sure he would like to have me go, too. Gardiner was much younger than I, too young for Harvard, they thought, so he was having a year at Tech. So Miss Blatch-ford put it through, and every morning Gardiner and I walked to Allston and took a train under the big railroad bridge. We got out when the train stopped before crossing the Boston and Albany road near where the Trinity Place station now is. We got through a hole in the fence 75 and were very near the Tech. This was the beginning of a very happy friendship lasting, alas, only a few years, for Gardiner died very young. From St. James Avenue to Columbus Avenue was all railroad tracks - like the great space along Boylston Street now - only on the street grade. Next year I used the horse cars to go to Boston. From our parlor window we could see the car coming down Brattle Street and run out to get it. If I was late for my usual car old Jerry, the driver, waited for me. The cars from Harvard Square to Boston had been electrified and we always had to change at the Square - in the open - in every kind of weather. I took only what was called a "partial course" in architecture - two years - but I got a job in the office of Francis R. Allen of Allen and Kenway. All eyes were turned on Chicago where was being built the great Columbian Exposition which had a marvellous architectural effect on the country. Mr. Robert Peabody, 1893 who was one of the Committee of Architects planning the exposition telegraphed me to enter a competition for the Women's Building at this Fair. I told Miss Hayden about it. Mr. Chicopo Allen gave me leave of absence and we both went to work. She got the first prize and built the building. I got the second prize, $500.00, and that meant I could go to Europe. Expo 76 MOUNT AUBURN'S SIXSCORE YEARS BY OAKES I. AMES Read April 22, 1952 THE consecration of Mount Auburn Cemetery one hundred and JL twenty years ago last September constituted a notable landmark in the history of landscape gardening as applied to cemeteries. For the first time in this country a large burial ground was opened to the public in beautiful rural surroundings in sharp contrast with the crowded and frequently ard On The Charles Page 1 of 4 BAHS Home I History Neighborhoods Photo Collection Brighton Allston Historical Society This article by Allston-Brighton historian Dr. William P. Marchione appeared in the Allston-Brighton Tab or Boston Tab newspapers in the period from July 1998 to late 2001, and supplement information in his books The Bull in the Garden (1986) and Images of America: Allston-Brighton (1996). Researchers should, however, feel free to quote from the material, with proper attribution. Harvard on the Charles For the first nearly 300 years of its history, Harvard University was largely confined to the area in and around the Harvard Yard near Harvard Square. Harvard was then a rather small school. As late as 1869, it had an enrollment of barely 1100 students, and a faculty of a meager twenty-four. Harvard spread to the banks of the Charles River only at the turn-of- the-century as its enrollment and educational mission expanded. So successful was the turn-of-the-century enlargement of the campus from a stylistic standpoint---the predominant architectural medium being the neo-classical style---that today's casual observer probably assumes that the university buildings on the river date from the 18th rather than the early 20th century. This successful integration of the old and new portions of the Harvard campus was a truly great achievement, testimony both to the vision and energetic leadership of two great Harvard Presidents, Charles W. Eliot and A. Lawrence Lowell, as well as to the great talent of the architects the university commissioned to carry out this singular expansion program. Prior to 1900, the Charles River shoreline east of Boylston Street (now John F. Kennedy Street)---a district then known as Riverside---wa one of the least attractive areas on the margin of the Charles. Prior to 1906, when a dam was built at the river's mouth to permanently exclude the tides, the contracting and receding shoreline made the river's edge unsuitable for anything other than commercial and industrial uses. Riverside had accordingly developed into a district clogged with unattractive commercial structures---an assortment of wharves, coal yards, storehouses, even a power plant. http://www.bahistory.org/HarvardCharles.html 7/31/2018 vard On The Charles Page 2 of 4 This was also true to a lesser extent of the less developed Allston-Brighton side of the river, where a coal company stood adjacent to the North Harvard Street Bridge, the wooden bridge that then spanned the river on the site of the present Larz Anderson Bridge. The first proposal for the development of Charles River shoreline by Harvard was advanced in 1894 by the great landscape architect Charles Eliot son of Harvard's President Charles W. Eliot. It was young Eliot's suggestion that Harvard immediately proceed to develop the more than one hundred acres it owned on the Allston-Brighton side of the river. This land had come to Harvard as a result of two late 19th century gifts. One of the parcels, the Brighton Meadows, had been donated to the college in the early 1870s by the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and several of his Brattle Street neighbors. Learning that a group of Brighton butchers (Brighton was then the regional headquarters of cattle and slaughtering trades) were proposing to build a giant slaughterhouse, or abattoir, on the site that would have spoiled their view of the southside meadows, these concerned property owners purchased the acreage and presented it to Harvard. The second gift, Soldier's Field, was deeded to the university in the 1890s by the banker-philanthropist Henry Lee Higginson (founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) in memory of six Harvard classmates who had been killed in the Civil War. The first Harvard buildings constructed on the river's edge went up on the Allston-Brighton shore in the 1897 to 1903 period and were athletic facilities. They included Carey Cage, dating from 1897 (a structure only recently demolished). Adjacent playing fields and wooden spectator's stands were also built. Then, in 1900, the handsome Newell Boat House was constructed just west of the North Harvard Street Bridge, a work of Peabody & Stearns, notable for its use of slate as a facade covering. The next major Harvard edifice constructed on the south bank, dating from 1903, was the massive Harvard Stadium, designed by the renowned architects McKim, Mead, & White. This stadium, which seats more than 50,000 spectators, enjoys the distinction of being the http://www.bahistory.org/HarvardCharles.html 7/31/2018 vard On The Charles Page 3 of 4 world's first massive structure of reinforced concrete, as well as the nation's first large arena for college athletics. The oldest extant Harvard structure on the north side of the river is the Weld Boat House, which lies just east of the foot of the Larz Anderson Bridge, and dates from 1907. Rowing is Harvard's oldest organized athletic activity, going back to 1852. This handsome masonry structure replaced a modest wooden boat house that boating enthusiast George Walker Weld built for Harvard in 1890. Harvard's adoption about 1910 of a new policy, requiring lower classmen to live in university housing, provided the major impetus for the acquisition and development of the Riverside acreage. It was hoped that this "House System" would foster intellectual communication between students and junior faculty, who would also occupy these handsome new dormitories. A. Lawrence Lowell, President of Harvard from 1909 to 1933, carefully supervised every aspect of the large-scale construction project to which the new housing policy gave rise. As the Cambridge Historical Commission noted of these new structures on the Charles, their architecture reflected "a conscious effort by the administration to extend the atmosphere of the old Harvard Yard to a new South Yard and thus to symbolize the continuity of the Harvard 'Collegiate Way of Life." The first of the four Houses to be built facing Memorial Drive between Boylston and Flagg Streets, Winthrop House, consists of two edifices, Standish and Gore Halls, both built in 1913. The latter structure is notable for its garden facade, recalling Hampton Court in England. Winthrop Hall was designed by the architectural firm of Shepley, Rutan, & Coolidge. Next came McClintock Hall, built in 1925 and enlarged in 1930, a structure which has since been absorbed into the modern Leverett House complex. Then, between 1929 and 1930, two additional Houses were built on the river, anchoring the eastern and western ends of this handsome. First came Dunster House, at the eastern end, then Eliot House at the corner of Memorial Drive and Boylston Street, opposite the Weld Boat House. Both were designed by Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch, & Abbott. The Harvard School of Business Administration, founded in 1908, had in the meantime built a magnificent new complex on the Allston shore east of the Larz Anderson Bridge on a parcel of land that had once been the farm of Emery Willard. Dating from the 1925 to 1927 period, this handsome grid of ivy-covered Georgian Revival style buildings, with the neo- classical George F. Baker Library as its focal point, faced the river. The Business School complex, like neighboring Harvard Stadium, was designed by McKim, Mead, & White. Prior to 1913 the only bridge across the Charles in the vicinity of Harvard had been the old wooden drawbridge at North Harvard Street, on the site of Great Bridge, the first bridge on the basin, built in 1662. The old Harvard Street Bridge was replaced in 1913 by a handsome neo-classical brick and concrete span designed to blend with the architecture of nearby Harvard buildings. Larz Anderson, U.S. Ambassador to Belgium and an 1888 Harvard graduate, furnished the money for the structure, which was named in memory of his father, Nicholas Longworth Anderson of the Harvard class of 1858. http://www.bahistory.org/HarvardCharles.html 7/31/2018 vard On The Charles Page 4 of 4 The other Harvard area bridge, the Weeks Foot Bridge, was built in 1926 while the Business School was under construction with the object of linking together the two halves of the campus, which the Charles River now SO conspicuously divided. It was named for U. S. Secretary of War John W. Weeks, a former U.S. Senator and Mayor of Newton. The money for this handsome structure, also neo-classical in style, was donated by thirteen friends and business associates of Weeks. It too was designed by McKim, Mead & White. Thus in the 1897 to 1931 period Harvard University completely altered the appearance of both sides of the Charles River near Harvard Square, thereby transforming one of the ugliest stretches of the Charles River into what most modern observers would agree is one of its greatest attractions. BAHS Home I History I Neighborhoods I Photo Collection http://www.bahistory.org/HarvardCharles.html 7/31/2018 UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR SONS HARVARD UNIVERSITY ITS HISTORY, INFLUENCE, EQUIPMENT AND CHARACTERISTICS WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES AND PORTRAITS OF FOUNDERS, no BENEFACTORS, OFFICERS, AND ALUMNI EDITOR-IN-CHIEF GENERAL JOSHUA L. CHAMBERLAIN, LL.D. Wards. EX-PRESIDENT OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE AND EX-GOVERNOR OF MAINE to SPECIAL EDITORS Approved by Authorities of the University HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHICAL WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER, A.M. (Class of '81) CHARLES E. L. WINGATE (Class of '83) EDITOR HARVARD GRADUATES' MAGAZINE GENERAL MANAGER BOSTON JOURNAL INTRODUCTION BY HON. WILLIAM T. HARRIS, PH.D., LL.D. UNITED STATES COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION ILLUSTRATED BOSTON R. HERNDON COMPANY 1900 9°, UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR SONS siderably increased owing to the Civil War; nevertheless, the number of students did not diminish to the extent that might have been expected. The number of Seniors upon whom degrees were conferred between 1850 and 1859, averaged 82. The Class of 1860 graduated the largest up to that date; 1861, 81; 1862, 97; 1863, 120; 1864, 99; 1865, 84. President Hill's administration is memorable on two accounts; he initiated changes in the methods of instruction with a view to convert the College into a University, and he witnessed the final severing of the College from all interference by the State. On April 26, 1865, the Legislature passed a bill providing for the election of Overseers by such persons as have received from the College a degree of Bachelor of Arts, OF Master of Arts, or any honorary degree." The voting was fixed between the hours of ten A. M,. and four P. M. at Cambridge, Commencement Day; no member of the Cor- poration, or officer of government and instruc- tion was eligible as an Overseer, or was entitled to vote; and Bachelors of Arts were not allowed to vote until the fifth Com- mencement after their graduation. The Board of Overseers, as thus conf stituted, consists of the President and Treasurer ex officio, and of thirty members, divided into six classes of five members each, every class serving six years. In case of a vacancy, the remaining Overseers can supply it by vote, the person thus elected being "deemed to be a member of and to go out of office with the class to which his predecessor belongs." Among the other noteworthy events of President Hill's term were the building of Grays Hall (1863), and the in- troduction of a series of University Lectures (1863) by specialists. These courses, rather popular Tn their nature, were open to all members of the Uni- versity; and to the public JAMES WALKER. on the payment of five dollars. The Academic Council, composed of the Professors and Assistant Professors in the various Faculties, was founded with a view to suggest the subjects to be lectured upon and to recommend lecturers. CHAPTER V FROM COLLEGE TO UNIVERSITY, 1865-1897 P RESIDENT HILL resigned September 30, 1868: Charles William Eliot (Class of 1853), at that time a member of the Board of Overseers, was chosen to succeed him, May 19, 1869. President Eliot's administration, which has now extended over twenty-eight years, has been unquestionably the most memorable in the history of the University. Changes more numerous and more radical have been wrought than in any previous period of the same 1. JOSIAH QUINCY EDWARD EVERETT JARED SPARKS JAMES WARKER C. C. FELTON FIVE HARVARD PRESIDENTS 9.2 UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR SONS length; and they have affected most deeply not only Harvard itself, but the higher educa- tion of the whole country. It is still too soon to pass final judgment on many of these changes, but it is not too soon to state that they mark the transformation of the College into a University. Harvard men may also take pride in the thought that during this period Harvard has held her primacy among American colleges more surely than at any other time since rival colleges sprang up. Her experiments have been watched, her reforms have been first criticised and then limitated, her methods have been adopted, in a way that affords the surest proof of her leader- ship. Foremost among the radical changes at Har- vard during Pres- ident Eliot's ad- ministration, was the unreserved adoption of the Elective System, long and stub- bornly opposed its privileges were handed down from class to class, un- til at last they reached the Fresh- men. As a coro!- lary to this, vol- untary attendance at College exer- cises has been ac- corded to under- graduates, the ex- periment being tried first with the Seniors in 1874-75. The Law School has been completely reorganized its course has been lengthened from two years to three, and its instruction has been made methodical and progressive. A similar improve- ment has been effected in the Medical School, whose standard was raised above that of any other in the country, and whose course. has been fixed at three years, with an extra year for those who care to avail themselves of it. The Divin- Ity School, long FELTON on the verge of dissolution, has been resuscitated, and although it cannot yet be said to flourish, this is due to the general temper of the age in religious matters, rather than to the inadequacy of the facilities of the School itself. After repeated attempts the efficiency of the Scientific School has been enormously increased, until now that School needs only adequate endowment in order to take rank with the most flourish- ing departments of the University. The School of Veterinary Medicine, the Bussey Institution, the Arnold Arboretum, the transference of the Peabody Museum of American Archaology and the Museum of Comparative Zoology to the College, are landmarks in the extension of the University in different directions during the past twenty years. More detailed information will be given later, when we come to describe these branches separately. Y HISTORY AND CUSTOMS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY 93 To this period belongs also another wise reform - the abolition of compulsory attendance at religious services. In 1869, the Faculty ceased to require those students who passed Sunday at .home to attend Church, except as their guardians or parents desired; and it reduced the number of services to be attended by those who remained in Cambridge, from two to one. After much discussion and many petitions, attendance at prayers as well as at Sunday services, was left to the choice of the student. The old system of regulations was completely recast: the Faculty recognized that it had a more useful work to perform than to inspect the frogs and buttons on the students' coats, or to fix the hour for going to bed. The decorum of the undergraduates has improved in proportion as their independence has widened. Hazing has disappeared, and cases of serious disorder have been rare. Cribbing at examination, which a major- ity of students deemed venial when studies were prescribed, has almost passed away, since stud- ies have been elective. In 1869, the semi-annual exhi- bitions, which used to be held when a committee of the Overseers visited the College, were abandoned, since it was found that they no longer served their orig- inal purpose of stimulating the ambition of stu- dents. In the fol- lowing year the system of confer- ring "honors" on students who had passed a success- ful special exami- nation in some one department - as the Classics, or Mathematics - at the end of their Sophomore or Senior year, was introduced. In 1872, the Aca- demic Council was remodelled, to suggest candidates for the higher degrees, A.M., Ph.D. and S.D., and these degrees acquired a real THOMAS HILL value from the fact that they repre- sented a specified amount of graduate work. Before 1872 any graduate of three years' standing could secure an A.M. by the payment of five dollars. Indeed, the policy of the University has been to abolish the old custom of conferring meaningless degrees. Even those which are purely honorary in their nature (LL.D. and D.D.) have been bestowed more spar- ingly. The venerable practice of conferring the degree of Doctor of Laws on the Governor for the time being of Massachusetts - a practice which arose when that dignitary was ex officio the President of the Board of Overseers.- was broken up in 1883, when Benjamin F. Butler was Governor of the Commonwealth, and it is probable that the precedent will never be revived. 94 UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR SONS The salaries of the teachers were raised in 1869 - that of Professors being fixed at $4000, that of Assistant Professors at $2500, and that of instructors at $1000; but these figures repre- sent the maximum, and not the average sums received in the respective grades. In 1890 the salaries of fifteen Professors and of the Librarian were raised from $4000 to $4500; those of four law Professors from $4500 to $5000; Assistant Professors, during their second five years' service, were to receive $3000 instead of $2500, and some of the instructors had a slight increase, Nevertheless, the smallness of University teachers' stipends, when compared with HARVARD GATE the income which successful doctors, lawyers and clergymen receive for intellectual work of relatively the same quality, indicates that public sentiment still holds educators dangerousty cheap. Fine dormitories, spacious halls, vast museums and costly apparatus do not make a University; men, and only men of strong intellect, of wisdom and spirituality, can make a University and they can be secured only by paying them an adequate compensation. Until society recognizes that the ideal educator is really beyond all price, it will go on suffering from: evils and losses which a proper education might prevent. To lighten the work of the Harvard Professors, the Corporation have granted them a leave of absence for one year out of every seven. Further, a subscription has recently been opened to a fund to provide a pension those Professors who, after a long service, are incapacitated from either age or feebleness. In 1872 the experiment of conducting "University Lectures" was found to be unsuccessful; but it was still maintained with good results in the Law School till 1874. Summer courses in Chemis- try and Botany were offered to teachers and other students (1874), and they constantly grew in usefulness, SO that similar courses in other departments have been added, and now the Summer HISTORY AND CUSTOMS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY 95 School is attended by over 600 students. In 1875, spring examinations for the University were held in Cincinnati, and this scheme, too, proved SO beneficial that it has been extended to many other distant cities, and to some of the preparatory schools. In 1897, examinations for admis- sion to the Freshman Class were held in twenty-eight places outside of Cambridge, including Denver, San Francisco, Tokyo and Bonn. In 1875, also Evening Readings, open alike to the public and students, were introduced and they were repeated from year to year. Latterly, more formal lectures, College Conferences, etc., have increased to such a number that there is GRAYS HALL rarely an evening when two or three are not in progress. Since 1883 the Boston Symphony Orchestra has given each winter a series of concerts in Sanders Theatre, SO that the best music is within reach of the students. The method of instruction is -now by lectures and not by recitations in all those courses where lectures can be given to greater advantage. The. marking system- - a survival from the old seminary days, when marks were sent home regularly every quarter-has :been over- hauled- and reduced to the least obnoxious condition. Formerly, the maximum mark for any recitation was eight; the students were ranked for the year on a scale of 100, but, though the scale was the same, no two instructors agreed in their use of it. Some were "hard" and some were "soft" markers; some frankly admitted that it was impossible to get within five or ten per cent. of absolute exactness; others were SO delicately con- stituted that they could distinguish between fractions of one per cent. One instructor was popularly supposed to possess a marking "machine; another sometimes assigned marks less than zero. These anomalies were long recognized before a simple and more rational 96 UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR SONS "scheme was adopted, in 1886. "In each of their courses students are now divided into five groups, called A, B, C, D and E; E being composed of those who have not passed. To gradu- ate, a student must have passed in all his courses, and have stood above the group D in at least one-fourth of his College work; and for the various grades of the degree, honors, honorable mention, etc., similar regulations are made in terms of A, B, C, etc., instead of in per cents. as formerly." 1 The increase in the number of instructors in the various departments has also brought about what was first proposed in President Kirkland's time - the autonomy of each department over its own affairs, subject, of course, to the approval of the Governing Boards. COLLEGE YARD AND HOLWORTHY HALL Examinations are now held twice a year, at the end of January and in June, lasting about twenty days at each period. The examinations, except in courses involving laboratory work, are nearly all written, of three hours' length each. President Eliot, then Tutor in Mathematics, was the first to introduce written examinations, in the course under his charge, in 1854-55- Before that tests were oral. The College calendar was reformed in 1869, previous to which date a long vacation had been assigned to the winter months, chiefly for the benefit of poor students who partly supported themselves by teaching school for a winter term. As re- arranged, the College year extends from the last Thursday in September to the last Wednesday in June, with ten days' recess at Christmas and a week at the beginning of April. The remarkable expansion of the University since 1869 - to which expansion these changes bear witness - has been as great in material and financial concerns, as in policy. In 1869, the 1 W. C. Lane in the Third Report (1887) of the Class of 1881. HISTORY AND CUSTOMS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY 97 resources of Harvard amounted to $2,257,989.80, and the income to $270,404.63 in 1896, the capital was $8,526,813.67, the income was $1,212,201.15; and the Cambridge assessors valued the untaxed property of the College in Cambridge at $9,216,964.59. Seven large dormitories have been erected, viz. : - Thayer Hall, the gift of Nathaniel Thayer, in 1870; Holyoke, erected by the Corporation, in 1871; Matthews Hall, the gift of Nathan Matthews, and Weld Hall, the gift of William F. Weld, in 1872; Hastings Hall, the gift of Walter Hastings, in 1889; Perkins Hall, from the bequest of Mrs. Catharine P. Perkins, in 1893-94; and Conant Hall, from the bequest of Edwin Conant, in 1893-94. An addition to the Library, by which its capacity was COLLEGE YARD FROM MATTHEWS HALL more than doubled, was completed in 1877, and in 1895 a new book-stack and large reading- room were constructed by a remodelling of the interior of Gore Hall. Austin Hall, the new Law School, was built from plans by H. H. Richardson in 1883; the same architect designed Sever Hall (lecture and recitation rooms) in 1880. In 1871 a mansard roof was added. to Boylston Hall, the Chemical Laboratory, which has received several subsequent improvements; and College House was enlarged during the same year, when also the lecture-room and labora- tory of the Botanic Garden were completed. The Jefferson Physical Laboratory (for which Thomas Jefferson Coolidge was the chief contributor) was finished in 1883; that year the new Medical School in Boston was first occupied. The Museum of Comparative Zoology has grown by successive additions, the cost of which has been largely defrayed by Alexander Agassiz, until it now (1897) covers the two sides of the quadrangle originally proposed by Louis Agassiz; and on the third side the Peabody Museum of Archaology, begun in 1876 and added to in 1889, has almost reached the point of junction. The Bussey Institution (1870). the School of Veterinary Medicine (1883), the Library of the Divinity School (1887) and the Fogg Art Museum (1894) VOL. I.-7 98 UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR SONS are further monuments of President Eliot's administration. For athletic purposes several build- ings have been erected during this period: the University Boat House (1870) ; the Hemenway Gymnasium (1879), enlarged in 1896; the Weld Boat House (1890) ; the Carey Athletic Building (1890) the Locker Building on Soldier's Field, 1894. Two of the entrances to the College Yard have been provided with substantial gates, one given by Samuel Johnston (1890) and the other by George von L. Meyer (1892). The Foxcroft House was bought in 1888. The occupancy of the old Medical School by the Dental School, has involved building changes; as has the expansion of the Observatory, the Arnold Arboretum and the Veterinary School. The COLLEGE YARD FROM STOUGHTON HALL establishment of an astronomical station at Arequipa, Peru (1891), should also be included in this list of recent increase in University buildings. One other edifice, lemorial Hall deserves a more extended notice. In May 1865, a large number of graduates held a meeting in Boston to discuss plans for erecting a memorial to those alumni and students of Harvard who lost their lives in behalf of the Union during the Civil War. A Committee of eleven were appointed, consisting of Charles G. Loring, R. W. Emerson, S. G. Ward, Samuel Eliot, Martin Brimmer, H. H. Coolidge, R. W. Hooper, C. E. Norton, T. G. Bradford, H. B. Rogers and James Walker. At another meeting, in July, they presented a report, in which was the following resolution: "Resolved, That in the opinion of the graduates of Harvard College, a Memorial Hall' constructed in such manner as to indicate in its external and internal arrangements the purpose for which it is chiefly designed ; in which statues, busts, HISTORY AND CUSTOMS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY 99 portraits, medallions and mural tablets, or other appropriate memorials may be placed, commemo- rative of the graduates and students of the College who have fallen, and of those who have served in the army and navy during the recent Rebellion, in conjunction with those of the past bene- factors and distinguished sons of Harvard now in her keeping, - and with those of her sons who shall hereafter prove themselves worthy of the like honor, - will be the most appropriate, en- during and acceptable commemoration of their heroism and self-sacrifice; and that the construc- tion of such a hall in a manner to render it a suitable theatre or auditorium for the literary festivals of the College or of its filial institutions will add greatly to the beauty, dignity and effect of such memorials and tend to preserve them unimpaired, and with constantly increasing associ- ation of interest to future years." At Commencement this resolution was brought before the SEVER HALL alumni. After considerable discussion, in which some speakers proposed that a simple monu- ment or obelisk would be more appropriate than a building, the matter was referred to a Com- mittee of Fifty, which, on September 23d, reported in favor of a memorial hall. Messrs. Ware & Van Brunt, architects, were requested to submit plans, which were formally adopted at the following Commencement. It was also voted that the biographies of the Harvard men who served in the war be printed. Subscriptions were immediately solicited and the College con- veyed the land known as the Delta for the site of the new edifice. The corner-stone was laid October 6, 1870, with a prayer by the Rev. Phillips Brooks, addresses by the Hon. J. G. Palfrey, the Hon. William Gray, the Hon. E. R. Hoar, a hymn by Dr. O. W. Holmes, and a benediction by the Rev. Thomas Hill. The dedication ceremonies took place July 23, 1874. The total sum raised was $305,887.54 Sanders Theatre, to whose erection was devoted the accumulations 100 UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR SONS from bequest by Charles Sanders (of the Class of 1802), was completed in 1876, in time to be used for the Commencement exercises of that year. The portraits and busts belonging to the College were placed in Memorial Hall, which has since been used by the Dining Association. I MEMORIAL HALL The response given by Harvard men to the calls of patriotism and duty during the Civil War can best be illustrated by a simple table in which the number of graduates who enlisted is given in the first column and the number of those who lost their lives in the second : College 626 95 Medical School 382 15 Law School 163 19 Scientific School 34 6 Divinity School 25 2 Astronomical Observatory 2 I 1232 138 As in 1861 there were 4100 and in 1866 about 5000 alumni living, it will be seen that more than twenty-five per cent. supported the maintenance of the Union, in the field. But this per- centage would be increased if it were possible to know exactly the number of non-graduates who likewise enlisted. Many of these soldiers of Harvard attained distinction; but it is possible HISTORY AND CUSTOMS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY IOI to mention here only Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who died leading the charge of his colored troops at Fort Wagner; Colonel Charles Russell Lowell, one of Sheridan's ablest cavalry offi- cers, killed at Cedar Creek; General W. F. Bartlett, often wounded but never willing to retire: and Major-General Francis C. Barlow, the hero of the salient at Spottsylvania. Thus has the University augmented its resources during the past twenty-seven years. The gifts have been most generous, but as they have for the most part been designed by their donors for especial purposes, the unrestricted means at the disposal of the Corporation have not in- creased in proportion with the needs. Two curious bequests may be cited to show how unwise are benefactions subject to restriction. In 1716, the Rev. Daniel Williams left an annuity of £60 for the support of two preachers among the "Indians and Blacks," and in 1790, Mrs. Sarah SANDERS THEATRE Winslow gave £1367 in support* of a minister and schoolmaster in the town of Tyngsborough: the Treasurer of the College is still paying the income from these donations for the benefit of the nondescript Marshpee Indians and for the schooling of the children of Tyngsborough. The great fire in Boston in 1872 seriously affected the revenue of the College, but the deficit caused thereby was made good by a subscription in response to an appeal which President Eliot put forth. The only other untoward event was the burning of the upper part of Hollis Hall in 1876. It is impossible to specify more particularly the bequests which have enriched Harvard during the past two decades. The income now at the disposal of the College for beneficiary pur- poses amounts to more than $70,000 per annum - a sum sufficient to warrant the assertion made in the College Catalogue " that good scholars of high character but slender means are very rarely obliged to leave College for want of money." Nor can space be spared to enumerate the 198 UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR SONS Roman Father, Addison's Cata, The Revenge and The Orphan, - performed by the students in their rooms. Under date of November 13, 1758, Ames says Calabogus Club begun December 9, "went [to] Whitfield club [at] Hooper's cham[ber] December 31, Club at my chamber;" May 5,1759, Joyn'd the Tea Club ; October 19," Joyn'd a new Club." What the proceedings of these societies were we can only conjecture. Not until 1770, do we come to an association which still exists. This, the "Institute of 1770," was originally a Speaking Club, founded by Samuel Phillips, John Warren and other Seniors in the Class of 1771. No member was allowed to speak in Latin without special leave from the President. The orators spoke on stage four feet in diameter, two feet high, "with the front Corners clipt," and they chose such subjects as "The Odiousness of Envy," and "The Pernicious Habit of Drinking Tea." In 1773, this Club united with the "Mercurian Club," founded two years before by Fisher Ames. In 1801, it called itself "The Patriotic Association," and, later, "The Social Fraternity of 1770." In 1825, two more rivals, "The Hermetick Society" and the coalesced with it, under the name of the "Institute." It passed from the Seniors to the Juniors, and at last to the Sophomores, who elect in May every year ten Freshmen; these, at the beginning of their Sophomore year, elect the rest of the members- - seven or eight tens " in all - of their Class. The "Institute" kept up its literary exercises until about 1875, when it became merely the mask behind which the A.K.E., a secret society, hid itself. The first four or five "tens" were members of the A.K.E.; the others had the empty honor of calling themselves members of the "Institute." The A.K.E., popularly called the Dickey," is now the most harmful society in the College; its regular meetings resemble the Kneipe of German students; its neo- phytes are subjected to silly and sometimes injurious hazing, under the guise of initiation; its members give three theatrical performances each year. Some of the most prominent members of the Class of 1883, finding that they could not reform the A.K.E., resigned from it in a body. About 1890, the newspapers having given startling reports of the proceedings of the Dickey, the Faculty threatened to abolish it whereupon its members pledged- themselves to do away with the more objectionable practices. The Harvard Chapter of the Ph Beta Kappa was founded in 1779. In its origin it was a secret society, devoted to the encouragement of literary exercises. Its members were Seniors and Juniors. In 1831, the veil of secrecy was withdrawn, and the mystic letters .B.K. were found to stand for Dirooodía Blov , - Philosophy the guide of life." Its-members were chosen according to their rank in scholarship rarely, besides the first twenty-five, a man of lower grade was admitted. The undergraduate work of the Society ceased long ago; but it holds a. meeting annually on the day after Commencement, at which graduate and undergraduate members attend, to listen to an oration and a poem by men of distinc- tion chosen for the occasion. Honorary membership is coveted by those who failed while in College to secure the rank required for election, but who since graduation- have distinguished themselves. The Hasty Pudding Club" is the most characteristic and famous of all the Harvard Socie- ties. It was founded in 1795, by members of the Junior Class, among whom were Horace Binney and John Collins Warren. Its aims were to "cherish the feelings of friendship and patriotism." At its weekly meetings two members in turn provided a pot. of hasty pudding. Besides the regular debates and essays, there was given a public performance every spring, at which an oration and poem were delivered. On December 13, 1844, members of the Class of 1845 gave in Hollis II the burlesque Bombastes Furioso, with which the custom of performing HISTORY AND CUSTOMS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY 199 a farce originated ; this has gradually been extended until now there are three theatrical per- formances each year 1 one before Christmas, one before the Spring recess, and one, "Straw- berry Night," just before Class Day, For many years the "Pudding" troupe repeated their performances in Boston and New York for the. benefit of the University Boat Club; but in 1896, the Faculty refused permission for the theatrical or musical clubs to give performances in places SO distant that the students could not return to Cambridge from there the same even- ing. Up to 1849, the Pudding's meetings were held in the rooms of the members; then, the College allowed the Society to use Stoughton 29, to which three other rooms were subsequently added. But, owing to a fire in 1876, which broke out in the Pi Eta rooms in Hollis, the Fac- ulty remo d the Club to the wooden Society Building on Holmes Field. This was SO far away that the meetings were poorly attended, and the Class of 1880 hired supplementary rooms on OLD HASTY PUDDING CLUB Brattle Street. That Class also raised a subscription among its members for a new building; the Class of 1881 took the scheme up, laid it before the graduates, formed committees for col- lecting funds, and SO pushed the project that in 1888 a large new club-house, costing over $30,000 and containing a library, meeting-rooms and theatre, was dedicated on Holyoke Street. Formerly, the Seniors chose eight Juniors who in turn elected the members from their class. To be on the first eight" was deemed a sign of great popularity. But with the increase in mem- bership this old scheme, which engendered much wrangling, has been given up; the members are elected in larger squads, and their names are arranged alphabetically. The Class of 1881 also abolished the old initiation, - running in the Yard, going to bed at sunset, writing mock- essays, and the bath in the meal-tub, - childish performances which no longer suited the times. The "Pudding" is now the largest social organization in the College; its secrecy has been abandoned, and it ought in the future, if properly directed, to be not only the best exponent of undergraduate opinions, but also a strong means of fostering the interest of the graduates in HISTORY AND CUSTOMS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY 219 of any denomination. That year, therefore, is a landmark in the history of Harvard; in that year she was emancipated from bondage to a single sect. Even longer was her servitude to the State. Colonial and Provincial Governors, their Councils, and the General Court exercised from decade to decade an ex officio control over the College. To them the teachers had to look for salaries, and we have seen how often they looked in vain, how many wore themselves out for a mere pittance, and how President after President was hampered and persecuted by the law-makers in Boston. Nor did their condi- tion improve when Massachusetts became an independent Commonwealth for the State retained its control, but shirked the obligations which that control imposed, and at last, cut off all subventions. The College, forced to support itself, and proving that it could do so, demanded that in justice it should govern its own affairs; but, although experience showed how pernicious is the mixing up of education with partisanship, it was not until~1865, that the Legislature at last released its hold. That year is the other great landmark in Harvard's career; it witnessed her emancipation from the State, and the transfer of the conduct of her affairs to those most interested in her prosperity - her alumni. From restrictions to liberty has been likewise the course of her progress in other things. Once, all studies were prescribed ; now each student is free to choose the studies most con- genial to his tastes and talents. Restrictions as to worship, dress and diet have all passed away; we read of them now in the old books, with feelings not unlike those aroused by the sight of medixel instruments of torture at Nuremberg,- they belong to another time; the wonder is that men could have thought them profitable or necessary at any time. We discern three critical periods in the development of Harvard: first, that covered by the administration of Leverett, when the attempts of the Mather faction were frustrated, the relations between the Corporation and the Overseers were fixed, the old Charter was revived, and the munificence of Hollis and other benefactors strengthened the resources of the College; second, Kirkland's term, when the College was expanded into a University through the creation of departments of Medicine, Law and Divinity, when old methods of instruction were reformed, and more liberal iews of religion began to be held, however timidly; third, the present administration of President Eliot, during which, besides marvellous growth in the College and Schools, and besides the erection of many buildings and the creation of new departments, there are to record the recognition of what a university should be, and the endeavor to raise every department to the level of that recognition. At no other period has Harvard had SO decisive an influence on the educational standard of the United States as between 1870 and to-day; and henceforth, freed from the trammels of Church and State, loosed from the bonds of obsolete methods, with the consciousness of noble work achieved, with equipments and appliances undreamt of even half a century-ago, with not merely a struggling colony but a vast nation within reach of her voice, -what may she not achieve as the guardian and imparter of Truth ! P 3: Harvard Square History & Dev't by Charles Sullivan, CHC Page 1 of 5 Harvard Square History and Development by Charles M. Sullivan, Executive Director Cambridge Historical Commission (Continued from Part 2 ) C. The Gold Coast and the River Houses Charles W. Eliot became president of Harvard in 1869 and launched an expansion that saw enrollment in Cambridge rise from 754 in 1870 to 3,364 at the end of his tenure in 1909. The many private dormitories that were constructed in or near Harvard Square between 1876 and 1904 introduced a level of luxury that was unprecedented in Cambridge and rare even in Boston. These buildings introduced steam heat, electricity, private bathrooms, and elevators to Cambridge. Rival investors strived to attract the most affluent students, and exclusive clubs contributed to the ambience of the area. Massachusetts Avenue and Mount Auburn Street between Dunster and Bow streets, along with Holyoke, Linden, and Plympton streets, thus became known as the Gold Coast (Fig. 7). Courtesy of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities Figure 7. The Gold Coast (Mount Auburn Street, looking east from Holyoke Street) at Harvard University. May 1, 1912. Photograph by Nathaniel S. Stebbins. Courtesy of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. (Negative #21207-NS) President Eliot thought that German universities, which did not provide dormitories for their students, offered the best model for academic excellence and personal self-reliance. Harvard during his administration gave undergraduates great personal freedom, and tacitly encouraged investors to construct private dormitories. His successor, A. Lawrence Lowell, reversed this approach; following English precedent, he established the house system and required students to live in college buildings. The implementation of these radically different policies for student housing transformed Harvard Square in the 1890s and again in the 1920s. Eliot built three dormitories in the Yard immediately after taking office, but then built no more for almost twenty years. After 1870, the university made little effort to keep its accommodations in line with enrollment, and the proportion of undergraduates that could be accommodated on campus dropped from about 50 percent in 1890 to 27 percent in 1900. In 1891, Eliot called for inexpensive student housing to be provided in the community, saying in his annual report that "cheap board and cheap rooms in Cambridge are necessary means for building up here a great, popular institution." However, the Cambridge Chronicle noted that a student seeking rooms for $50 per year, a price Eliot thought was reasonable, would have to travel at least a mile from the Yard if accommodations in the college could not be found. http://www2.cambridgema.gov/historic/hsqhistory3.html 1/17/2012 P 3: Harvard Square History & Dev't by Charles Sullivan, CHC Page 2 of 5 Eliot's appeal was met by construction of luxurious private dormitories that could command up to $700 per year. Between 1891 and 1904, seventeen major private dormitories were put up around Harvard Square. On the Gold Coast alone, ten luxury residence halls were joined by more than a dozen undergraduate clubhouses. Claverly Hall (1892) anchored the emerging Gold Coast and set the standard for succeeding dormitories. It was the largest dormitory thus far, with fifty suites priced from $250 to $500 per year, and offered such "modern improvements" as electric bells, speaking tubes, a swimming pool, and squash courts. Other dormitories offered valet and maid service, round-the- clock doormen and elevator operators, room service, and bellhops. Both Dunster (1895) and Craigie (1897) halls incorporated swimming pools. Randolph Hall (1897) had a gymnasium and squash and racquetball courts. Another ingredient of the Gold Coast was provided by the undergraduate social clubs. Harvard students formed clubs in the 18th century, but had no clubhouses until after the Civil War. Having such a base was particularly desirable because the university was not always willing to grant space for club activities, particularly when their antics earned the administration's disapproval. Several clubs first purchased dwellings near the Yard. The first clubhouse built for the purpose was the Hasty Pudding (1887), at 12 Holyoke Street. Subsequently, almost all the clubhouses were constructed on the Gold Coast. One club, Delta Upsilon, lost popularity because its otherwise attractive clubhouse was too far from the Gold Coast, SO in 1930 it put up a new building at the corner of Mount Auburn and Dunster streets. The development of the Gold Coast had an immediate effect on the economy of Harvard Square, whose businesses began to reflect the needs of the well-to-do students. The Boston brokerage firm of Kidder, Peabody & Co. opened a storefront office in Little's Block. Leavitt & Pierce, the tobacconist, opened a store in Fairfax Hall in 1883, and J. August, the clothier, opened next door on the first floor of the Porcellian Club about 1910. The Art Nouveau storefront at 1304 Massachusetts Avenue was designed by Coolidge & Carlson for Coes & Young, the Boston shoe store, in 1907. Bookstores, tailors, dining rooms, furniture shops, and other student-oriented businesses proliferated. Many of the landmarks of this period still exist and contribute to the rich texture of Harvard Square. Gold Coast residents adopted the automobile with enthusiasm. By 1902 two-thirds of the cars kept at the Harvard Motor Company on Palmer Street were owned by undergraduates. The concrete building at 1230 Massachusetts Avenue presently owned by the Harvard Cooperative Society was one of the earliest garages in the Square; built in 1906, it accommodated students living at Hamden Hall, the private dormitory at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Linden Street. By the turn of the century, the social climate of the Gold Coast became a cause of concern among some alumni and university officials. While the Harvard community debated the university's role in student life, a group of alumni secretly initiated a land venture that had great implications for Harvard and for Cambridge. In the 19th century there were four or five blocks of houses along Mount Auburn, Winthrop and South streets, some remaining from the first period of settlement; these were occupied by tradesmen, shopkeepers, and laborers. Town Creek, the landing of the early ferry across the Charles, still existed as the dock of Richardson & Bacon's coal wharf at the foot of Dunster Street. To the west of John F. Kennedy Street, the old Ox Marsh was a fetid area of sheds and hovels where the West End Street Railway and its successors constructed carbarns and stables. In 1897 the company built an electric generating station on the present site of Eliot House, at the corner of John F. Kennedy Street and Memorial Drive. The Lower Marsh, the area between Mount Auburn Street, Holyoke Place, and Putnam Avenue, was filled in after the Civil War to accommodate the growing Irish community that attended St. Paul's Church. In 1901, the alumni set out to acquire land for the university between Mount Auburn Street and the new Charles River Road (now Memorial Drive). Harvard was aware of this project by the fall of 1902, but President Eliot was ambivalent about it. While Eliot encouraged the fund-raisers, he had recently assured the General Court that the university's interest was in beautifying the area and that no land would be removed from taxation. Within a few years, however, the alumni had acquired almost all the private properties in the area and transferred them to the University. When A. Lawrence Lowell became president in May 1909, he ordered a master plan for the area that foretold the house system, modeled after the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. The end of the private dormitories was foretold by the vote of the faculty in December 1913 to require entering students to live in dormitories beginning with the 1914-15 school year. The profits from Randolph Hall dropped from $18,250 in 1914 to $892 in 1915. While President Lowell regretted the difficulty this caused some of the owners, he did not want to provoke the city and refused to buy the distressed properties. http://www2.cambridgema.gov/historic/hsqhistory3.html 1/17/2012 P 3: Harvard Square History & Dev't by Charles Sullivan, CHC Page 3 of 5 Meanwhile, many of the smaller private dormitories had already been converted to apartments by adding kitchens to the suites. Harvard responded to the housing shortage by building more dormitories of its own. Lowell House and McKinlock and Mather halls were built on former alumni land in 1929. The university purchased property east of e Wolfe Street around 1926-27 for Dunster House (1929) and, more dramatically, acquired the generating station of the Boston Elevated Railway. When this was razed in 1930 to make room for Eliot House, Harvard dominated the riverfront of Old Cambridge. Only the John Hicks House of 1762 was spared; it was moved to 64 John F. Kennedy Street in 1929 to become the library of Kirkland House. The second phase of River House construction was almost as dramatic. Between 1958 and 1968, 68 more buildings containing 145 housing units were razed in Riverside to make room for Leverett, Quincy, and Mather houses and Peabody Terrace. Only a handful of houses on South, Dunster, Winthrop, and Mount Auburn Streets remain from this ancient neighborhood. D. Metropolitan Harvard Square At the turn of the century, when the Gold Coast dormitories and undergraduate clubs were transforming the old village, Harvard Square seemed dowdy and ramshackle compared to Boston's fashionable Back Bay, to which Cambridge was linked by the Harvard Bridge in 1890. The designation of Front, Main, and Harvard streets and North Avenue as Massachusetts Avenue in 1890 drove home the comparison. Property owners were slow to modernize, and the Square did not join the modern era until after World War I. While places serving students were mainly along Massachusetts Avenue facing the Yard, the stores in Harvard Square itself were patronized by the thousands of commuters who changed streetcars there. The increasing demand for retail space displaced some of the old businesses to the periphery of the business district, although carriage builders (now being succeeded by garages) and carpenters' shops still predominated on Church and Palmer streets. The distinctly 19th-century appearance of these peripheral streets persisted well into the 20th century, a contrast to the modern buildings on the Gold Coast. An early attempt to upgrade the business district was made in 1896, when the Read heirs and the West End Street Railway collaborated to unify all the buildings from Willard's Tavern to Farwell's store with a simple neoclassical facade. The first modern commercial building in the Square was erected in 1909 at Brattle and John F. Kennedy streets. Here Edwin H. Abbot, a Midwestern railroad financier, built a small but elegant brick office building that anticipated the burst of commercial construction that followed the completion of the subway. Brattle Square was still a disreputable area of stables and shabby storefronts, while the site of the University Press had been empty since 1893 and would largely remain SO until 1990. The electrification of the horsecars in 1889 had brought great congestion to Harvard Square; the Boston Herald called the situation "confusion worse compounded," and said it was "an ugly a terminus as can be found in a day's journey" (quoted in the Cambridge Chronicle, July 7, 1894). The reorganization of routes that followed the completion of Boston's Tremont Street Subway in 1897 made conditions even worse. Through cars continued out North Avenue and Mount Auburn Street, but the East Cambridge, Broadway, Watertown, and Newton lines all terminated in Harvard Square. On summer Sundays, as many as 20,000 people changed cars, and for football games or other college events there could be twice as many. There were two lines of car tracks on each side of Harvard Square but no platforms and only a crowded waiting room in the former Willard's Tavern. The first plan to alleviate this situation was to construct an elevated railway, which would have approached Harvard Square by way of Mount Auburn Street. This plan was abandoned because of community protests, and ground was broken on August 5, 1909, for a subway. Surface construction was essentially complete by October 1911, and when the line opened the following March, the response was enthusiastic. Passengers from the northern and western suburbs--at that time the bulk of the traffic--were able to transfer below ground. Only the lines on Massachusetts Avenue, Broadway, and Cambridge Street still stopped on the surface to transfer passengers to the subway, and the congestion described SO colorfully a few years before was alleviated until the automobile became common after World War I. The headhouse of the subway, or kiosk, was a simple oval brick structure with colonnades on the east and west sides. The design harmonized with the architecture of the university, and the materials were the same "Harvard" brick and limestone trim specified for the fences and gates that had recently been erected around the Yard. Unfortunately, the headhouse was dangerous for pedestrians and motorists alike, as the two sets of car tracks on each side left little room for other traffic. http://www2.cambridgema.gov/historic/hsqhistory3.html 1/17/2012 P 3: Harvard Square History & Dev't by Charles Sullivan, CHC Page 4 of 5 After a long fight led by the Harvard Square Business Men's Association, in 1927 the Elevated erected a replacement. Designed to be transparent to oncoming traffic, the new kiosk comprised a thin, copper-covered roof of shallow, intersecting barrel vaults supported by piers of alternating waterstruck brick and limestone in a pattern similar to that of Harvard's Class of 1877 Gate, behind Widener Library. This structure, bedecked with signs promising "Eight Minutes to Park Street," symbolized Harvard Square to generations of students and visitors. Rebuilt and modernized in connection with the extension of the subway in 1978-86, the kiosk survives today as the Out Of Town Newsstand. The impact of the subway was immediately felt by the shopkeepers in Harvard Square. Free transfers had allowed fifteen minutes between cars, but now commuters could not come to the surface without paying an extra fare. Only stores catering to students felt no adverse effects. Since 1910, the shopkeepers had been represented by the Harvard Square Business Men's Association, which was founded in reaction to the disruption of subway construction and "to promote the commercial and industrial interests of Harvard Square" (HSBA Bulletin, April 1911). In 1912, the Association formed a "committee to consider the future of Harvard Square" and petitioned the mayor to ask President Lowell to appoint "experts to prepare a plan for [the] future development of Harvard Square." President Lowell enlisted several architecture professors, and in March 1912, the two committees met with the mayor and agreed that the study should consider the Square in the wider context of Cambridge and its surrounding towns. The committee distinguished between Central Square, "the natural business centre of Cambridge," and Harvard Square, "the natural centre of a more expensive residence district, with such shops as serve the neighborhood tributary to it." It was suggested that this differentiation was "inevitable and highly desirable" and should be reinforced as a matter of public policy. In an ideal metropolitan area, both the "collegiate square" and the "centre of a high-class residence district" should be "quickly reached from the city, but quiet in use and appearance." Harvard Square met both criteria and "was already, in many ways, admirably fitted for its relations to the four main factors in its development -- shopping, residence, traffic, and the activities of the College." With great optimism, the committee noted that, "the successful development of Harvard Square requires only organized co-operation toward determined ends" (Ibid.). The Boston Evening Transcript described the proposals: Harvard Square would be redeveloped with a modern and commodious hotel where College House now stands, a large convention hall in Palmer Street, a building for a school of dramatic art, a wider Boylston [John F. Kennedy] Street, a wider Massachusetts Avenue between Harvard and Central squares, shops with arcades between Harvard and Quincy squares, [and] a boulevard from Quincy Square to the Charles River (2/25/1913). The committee advocated a uniform architectural style to "[fix] the character of the Square." "The close proximity of the dignified Colonial buildings of Harvard College, and the similar character of the better buildings already existing on this part of Massachusetts Avenue, suggest that this general character be preserved." It also commented that, "by preserving and emphasizing these admirable architectural traditions of Colonial and Georgian architecture, Harvard Square might win a character and an attractiveness which would be unique. The Business Men's Association also supported a recommendation for a "permanent expert commission with advisory powers" to review projects in the Square The city took no action, however, perhaps because the General Court was already considering legislation for municipal planning boards, which passed in 1914. The rebuilding of the commercial district resumed once the subway was completed. In 1913, George Dow, a Cambridge real estate man, purchased some lots that had been cleared for the subway and erected a modern office building in the Georgian style. Three years later, the Harvard Trust Company demolished two bays of College House next to the Coop and put up a one-story bank. When prosperity returned after the war, the Cambridge Savings Bank built a new building on the Square and sold its 25-year-old building on Dunster Street. The renewal of the Square was completed in 1924 when the Harvard Cooperative Society demolished Lyceum Hall and built a new store that complemented Harvard's new Georgian dormitories. After World War I, the Harvard Square shopping district expanded to include Brattle Square, where a new post office was built in 1919, and the Sage family replaced the old Jacob Bates house with a Georgian-style market in 1926. George Dow acquired most of the remaining frontage between Palmer and Church streets, which was occupied by a motley collection of storefronts and only one substantial building, 11-25 Brattle Street. When his son Richard graduated from Harvard in 1935, he was given the task of converting the family's holdings into a modern shopping district. At first employing the Cambridge architect William L. Galvin, the Dows removed the unproductive upper stories of 17-25 Brattle Street and refaced the entire row with an up-to-date Moderne facade in cast stone by 1941. They assembled a mix of retailers that would appeal to West Cambridge housewives and even made overtures for the http://www2.cambridgema.gov/historic/hsqhistory3.html 1/17/2012 P3: Harvard Square History & Dev't by Charles Sullivan, CHC Page 5 of 5 Filene's store that settled in Belmont center about 1954. Richard Dow's policies defined the retail character of Brattle Square for two generations. By the 1950s, his tenants included an A&P supermarket, two florists, two jewelers, clothing stores, an appliance store, and a dry cleaner's. Dow, who managed the properties until his death in 1988, maintained elements of this mix as a matter of sound retail principles when market forces were rewarding high-volume, mass-market chain stores and boutiques. > Return to CHC Homepage Return to City's Homepage http://www2.cambridgema.gov/historic/hsqhistory3.html 1/17/2012 /fm Article: The Gold Coast. The Harvard Crimson Online Page 1 of 8 mar 11, 1999 fm table of m is the weekend magazine of the harvard crimson. CONTENTS ONLINE THE GOLD COAST by Frances G. Tilney "Harvard has always offered its own ordeal, its own version of `reality," its own way of giving form to freedom--the contests in the classroom and elsewhere, where children of wealth compete to prove their excellence. Nobody who's got it made' has to strive for A's at Harvard, or go out for the varsity, or try for the lead in undergraduate plays, or `comp' for the Crimson, or do much of anything except get by and get into the Porcellian Club. Everything is optional, as most things always will be for these children of the rich." --Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr., author of Old Money: the Mythology of America's Upper Class. Another typical evening. A group of perfectly groomed young gentlemen in dinner jackets stroll to their club for a brief bourbon. Tonight, the glittering ballroom of the cotillion is theirs for the taking. Silk gowns sway and champagne flows. The band thrills and the playboys survey the scene. The party swells. In the early morning hours, the gala subsides and the young men return to their lush apartments on Mount Auburn Street. "It was the Gold Coast. The visible plumbing was solid gold. The doorknobs were pigeon-blood rubies. We were Gilded Youths who needed to http://www.thecrimson.com/fmarchives/fm_03_11_1999/article5A.html 8/16/2004 /fm Article: The Gold Coast. The Harvard Crimson Online Page 2 of 8 have some of the gilt removed." For these young men, four years at Harvard did not symbolize an opportunity to advance intellect. Rather, college was an extravagant joyride. At the turn of the century, one member of the Gold Coast, Donald Clark Henderson, reveled in this world of fabulous superfluity: "I had a suite of three rooms: two bedrooms, study with fireplace, and bath, second floor front in Westmorely Court in Mt. Auburn Street. In the basement was the only swimming pool in Cambridge in those days. Boston newspapers referred to this neighborhood as the Gold Coast. The study proved to be an ideal spot for poker. The pool was a handy bit of moisture into which to dunk unsuspecting and slightly alcoholized guests, without bothering to remove their clothing- -often white tie and tails and a two-quart hat. This seemed to have a sobering effect." On the Gold Coast, students lived in the lap of luxury surrounded by all that money could buy. Local realtors jumped at the chance to rent exclusive apartment houses on Mt. Auburn Street catered to the needs of the extremely wealthy. Claverly Hall, Apley Court and Randolph Hall and Westmorely Court (today, part of Adams House) housed the College's rich kids. These students were the members of the social clubs, the clientele of the mirrored bars and marbled restaurants of downtown Boston and the owners the flashy Mercedes and Renaults parked along Mt. Auburn. Harvard playboys were fascinating creatures. Living in opulent Claverly Hall or Westmorely Court, these young men led lives of constant gayety--and all of America watched them. The boys of the Gold Coast were members of the elite--well-dressed, well-bred and well-endowed. Their world was classic yet cosmopolitan, restrained yet debaucherous. Henderson writes: "I again was conscious of the brilliant and thrilling spectacle--the lovely young girls in furs with flowers, undergraduates in bearskin and coonskin greatcoats, graduates, many with wives, many with bright-eyed sons and daughters and grandchildren, all wearing crimson, most of them waving banners, giving forth the unforgettable scents of a great Eastern football classic-odor of healthy flesh nipped by late November chill, perfume of flowers, perfume of perfume, perfume of feminine hair, sharp tang of Egyptian cigarette http://www.thecrimson.com/fmarchives/fm_03_11_1999/article5A.html 8/16/2004 /fm Article: The Gold Coast. The Harvard Crimson Online Page 3 of 8 fumes, clean breath of bourbon, smell of furs-- chanting roar of cheers, of thousands of male voices raised in enthralled song, shrill feminine screams of sheer ecstasy." Meanwhile, Henderson's cohort, the Prince of India, enshrouded in silks and jewels, lounged in his rooms in Westmorely Court. The social throng of the Gold Coast would go from spot to spot in Boston--to the best and most expensive locales to meet other young persons of quality. When in the luxurious atmosphere of their rooms, boys parted with exorbitant amounts of money to continue their high stakes reveling far into the night. Many Golden Youth kept scrapbooks of their social lives during the turn of the century--records of parties and club dinners and inordinate activities. They saved: scrolled Hasty Pudding invitations, silk-tasseled dance cards for exclusive parties, gold engraved menus for Porcellian dinners boasting aged port as an aperitif, festooned playbills, thick opera programs and multitudinous cotillion invitations with summons to some of the most prestigious and exclusive clubs and hotels in Boston. William Gibbons Morse, Class of 1899: "Boston is near and while the custom of Boston Society of inviting an unknown list of sophomores to meet their daughters at their debutante dances is not an unmixed blessing for boys engrossed in studies, neither is it an unmixed evil. This training does not make for good manners, tending to make a snob of an impressionable boy, who learns to think that he has been sought after by a social Boston of which he does not altogether approve, of which he may even be a bit contemptuous. Yet it does open a door for a needed contact with girls; it is possible for the not-too-shy man to call and make friends." But for some students at the turn of the century, most doors were closed. The Gold Coast was an exclusive club, and the Harvard administration had other priorities. In fact, rather than try and combat the social chasm between the rich and the poor, Harvard magnified the disparity by relegating the poorer students to the Yard. Living in the Yard meant many things: no heat, no running water and a strong feeling of social inferiority. This rooming system created a caste system within the student population. In 1897, Scribner's Magazine recognized the overwhelming elitism felt fraction of http://www.thecrimson.com/fmarchives/fm_03_11_1999/article5A.html 8/16/2004 /fm Article: The Gold Coast. The Harvard Crimson Online Page 4 of 8 Gilded Youth: "In this great collection of young men, there are lads who are used, when at home, to dine in a dresscoat, and very many others who never possessed a dresscoat and do not see the need for one lads who are used to society and lads that are not." The article illustrated Gold Coast living with sketches of young men lounging in their rooms, smoking cigars and generally enjoying the fruits of leisure. Struggling with tiny grates and dusty fireplaces, the boys in the Yard lived in cold and uncomfortable conditions. Their creature comforts were not Venetian mirrors and chaise lounges, but broken-down furniture and a Harvard pennant. "Fastidious youths who wanted plumbing had to room in private houses," writes historian Samuel Eliot Morison. There was no heat in any of the Yard buildings, and students bought their own coal and stored it in the basement of Grays Hall. An editorial in an 1895 Crimson vehemently protested the lack of bathing facilities and lamented that the only water to be found was in the basement of each building or from the pump outside of Hollis. Today, the pump rests as a bizarre monument in the Yard, but to the boys banished for lack of money, the pump was their sole source of plumbing. Morison felt that nothing could change the social strata SO strongly felt at Harvard. "Boston has been a social leech of Harvard College when the supply of eligible young men in Boston was decreased by the westward movement, the Boston mammas suddenly became aware that Harvard contained many appetizing young gentlemen from New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere In vain are freshmen tossed onto the same heap; freshman fellowship, brisk enough in the opening days of College and the first elections of committees, blows away in a whiff of invitations to dances and week-end house parties. The social cleaver widened the chasm that a mistaken laissez-faire created between Yard and Gold Coast; and not even the houses or the Depression have bridged that gap." Throughout its history, Harvard College has suffered the effects of a "social cleaver.' In the mid-eighteenth century the college president :- http://www.thecrimson.com/fmarchives/fm_03_11_1999/article5A.html 8/16/2004 /fm Article: The Gold Coast. The Harvard Crimson Online Page 5 of 8 personally usteu students, when they enronea, III order of their social rank or, to be precise, "to the Dignity of the Familie whereto the students severally belonged." The social list was printed in the college catalogue for all to see. The creme de la creme were placed at the top, followed by the social outcasts who attended Harvard because of academic merit. The social list determined precedence in table seating and service during meals, position in academic processionals and even class recitation. Without ancestral mansions in Newport or proof of a Mayflower voyage, the boys at the end of the list really did come last. This institutionalized method of social rank was soon terminated, not because it was deemed undemocratic, but because too many angry parents harrassed the president for not rating their sons high enough. Nevertheless, new lists emerged and even without the "official list" the Gold Coast was still shining in the distance, a glowing reminder of the best things in life. Living in the Yard was not the only punishment for poverty and social shortcomings. Subsequent presidents maintained an unofficial roster of the elite students and lists were used in many of the University clubs--especially the exclusive final clubs: the dictators of social success at Harvard. The Institute of 1770, which joined with the Hasty Pudding Club in 1926, began the social filtering at the beginning of sophomore year. The Institute chose the college's 100 most socially promising students and then ranked them in groups of 10, from the ultra-privileged to the "barely-elite." Local newspapers would publish the precise lists SO all of the city could see "everybody who was anybody." Woe to those young men in the Yard far away from Gold Coast leisure and social success. Enrique Hank Lopez, author of The Harvard Mystique, argues that the existing dichotomy between the Yard and the Gold Coast encouraged a rank-conscious Harvard population. "The majority who remained in the Yard, in addition to their physical discomfort, suffered the psychological stigma of being unfashionable. And when the new private dormitories [on the Gold Coast] increased the growth of elite private clubs, [President Charles] Eliot's critics accused him of erecting an aristocratic society on the ruins of the supposedly democratic community he had inherited." But times changed. The Housing system was http://www.thecrimson.com/fmarchives/fm_03_11_1999/article5A.html 8/16/2004 /fm Article: The Gold Coast. The Harvard Crimson Online Page 6 of 8 initiated. In theory, the Houses were a democratic advance for Harvard. President A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, wanted democracy to reign and usurp the aristocracy. The Gold Coast would be a thing of the past and the socially elite would mix with the common man. In the General Information for the Class of 1935, Lowell proclaimed his philosophy of the houses on the first page of the book: "The Houses are designed to help substitute for the schoolboy attitude of mind contacts, good talk, wide range of friendships, flourish when men live in a community, and take their meals in the same dining room, not only with other undergraduates of different classes, types and early associations, but also with tutors That is the meaning of the houses; but unfortunately some men do not appreciate these things and fail to take the full advantage of them until after the chance has gone." By design, this change would entail some discomfort for the Gold Coasters. But this new system of democracy was not a reality. To join a House, the master would interview an undergraduate to see if his attitude was an acceptable addition to the microcosm within the Harvard community. Soon the Houses gained reputations of their own. According to Dwight D. Miller, admissions officer and tutor in Eliot House for 30 years, "Master Finley [of Eliot House] and Master Perkins [of Lowell House] were famous for their interviews. They were the antithesis of randomization." Eliot and Lowell rapidly became the homes of the elite with a few "commoners" sprinkled in. In those days, students could pick their freshman roommates and many prep-school students and New York upper-crust chose to live together. They flocked to Eliot and Lowell in groups which were, says Miller, "pretty exclusively St. Grottlesex." This system passively supported the continuation of the Harvard caste system. Even though the Houses were somewhat diverse, the intense social polarization of the Gold Coast remained. While the House system became the so-called forum for socialization, Harvard students still felt that their social standing and careers depended on admission and success in a final club. Not every young gent made the cut--many were left outside in the cold, staring through the windows of the Pudding, watching the swirling gowns and flowing champagne--the legacy of the Gold Coast. http://www.thecrimson.com/fmarchives/fm_03_11_1999/article5A.html 8/16/2004 /fm Article: The Gold Coast. The Harvard Crimson Online Page 7 of 8 Boston society was stongly invested in the fate of the student-gentry and their new haunt--the social clubs--as they had been with the Gold Coast. One article found in the scrapbook of a 1903 graduate, George Stillman, proclaimed in the headline, "Student Stunts at Harvard!-Tests Required of Candidates for Secret Societies." The Boston Globe often announced the Hasty Pudding Annual Dance with detailed explanations of ball gowns and the appearance of the women as well as lists of the social elite at the party. Among the elite, there were students who chose not to participate in this exclusive social world. Walter C. Paine '49, grandson of President Eliot, slogged through the massacres of World War Two before beginning Harvard College. "Many of us looked down on the kids sliding by and getting C grades and having a hell of a time." Today, the Gold Coast glitters no longer. But even with current randomization policies, the question of elitism at Harvard remains. The College is accused of admitting students based on money and social standing rather than academic achievement. Miller claims that times have certainly changed. "Since the late 1960s, Harvard has been much more diverse. It started from a swing to public school acceptances post-World War Two. The country exploded demographically and SO admissions changed." However, author Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., maintains that the strength of aristocracy in Harvard affairs still holds strong: "For admissions officers, it's all a question of balance: between children of the `high' social composition of each entering class--and children of `talent.' The actual Harvard has usually fixed that balance at around 20 percent of alumni children. They are called, fittingly enough, `legacies." Wide social chasms, though not as pronounced as the separation between Coast and Yard, continue and flourish. Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis 68 states: "As far as where you live and what courses you take, Harvard has tried to eliminate differences based on personal resources, though of course it cannot wipe out all effects of personal differences in family means." http://www.thecrimson.com/fmarchives/fm_03_11_1999/article5A.html 8/16/2004 /fm Article: The Gold Coast. The Harvard Crimson Online Page 8 of 8 There is no longer the flurry of cotillion invitations and the constant sight of young men bedecked in top hats and tails strolling to their apartments on the Gold Coast to smoke a cigar under the light of a glowing chandelier. Nor the spectacle of languishing youths, waited on hand and foot by a faithful valet. However, the legacy of the Coast has not disappeared. Present-day inequity takes a subtler form. http://www.thecrimson.com/fmarchives/fm_03_11_1999/article5A.html 8/16/2004 Harvard University Archives : Selected Bibliography on Harvard History Page 1 of 3 HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARY HARVARD UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES HOLDINGS ACCESS AND USE ONLINE DONATING / AFFILIATED EXHIBITION RESOURCES TRANSFERRING MATERIAL REPOSITORIES CONTACT SEARCH FAQ SITE MAP Access and Use + Access Tools Selected Bibliography on Harvard History + Searching HOLLIS Bail, Hamilton Vaughan. Explanation of Views of Harvard: A Pictorial Record to 1860. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949. shelflists Tolman Index General Bailyn, Bernard and others. Glimpses of the Harvard Past. Cambridge: research guide Harvard University Press, 1986. + Biography research guide Beecher, Henry K. and Mark D. Altschule. Medicine at Harvard: The First + Civil War Three Hundred Years. Hanover, N.H.: The University Press of New research guide England, 1977. + Word War II research guide Books and boxes on the shelves Bentinck-Smith, William. Building a Great Library: The Coolidge Years at + Terms Of Access in the Harvard University Harvard. Cambridge: Harvard University Library, 1976. + Reading Room Use Archives reading room. + Submitting Reference Queries Bentinck-Smith, William, ed. The Harvard Book: Selections from Three + Ordering Centuries. Revised edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Photocopies + Ordering / Bentinck-Smith, William and Elizabeth Stouffer. Harvard University: Publishing History of Named Chairs: Sketches of Donors and Donations. 3 vols. Photographs Cambridge, Mass.: Secretary to the University, 1991-1995. + Citing Holdings + Publishing Bentinck-Smith, William and Elizabeth Stouffer. More Lives of Harvard Permission Scholars: A Selection of Biographies Written by Their Colleagues. Cambridge 1986. (A continuation of Lives of Harvard Scholars, below.) Bergin, Thomas. The Game: The Harvard-Yale Football Rivalry, 1875- 1983. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Bertagna, Joseph. Crimson in Triumph: A Pictorial History of Harvard Athletics, 1852-1985. Lexington, Mass.: The Stephen Green Press, 1986. Bethell, John T., Richard M. Hunt, and Robert Shenton. Harvard A to Z. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, c2004. Bethell, John T. Harvard Observed: An Illustrated History of the University in the Twentieth Century Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Blanchard, John A., ed. The H Book of Harvard Athletics, 1852-1922. Cambridge: Harvard Varsity Club, 1923. (See also: Movius, Geoffrey H., ed. The Second H Book. , below) Buck, Paul H., ed. Social Sciences at Harvard, 1860-1920: From Inculcation to the Open Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965. Bunting, Bainbridge. Harvard: An Architectural History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. Burton, John D. Puritan Town and Gown: Harvard College and Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1636-1800. A dissertation presented at the College of William and Mary, 1996, c1997. Cambridge Historical Commission. Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge. Report 2, Mid Cambridge. Report 4, Old Cambridge. Cambridge: Distributed by M.I.T. Pess, 1967, 1973. Carpenter, Kenneth. The First 350 Years of the Harvard University Library: Description of an Exhibition. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1986. Cohen, I. Bernard Some Early Tools of American Science: An Account of the Early Scientific Instruments and Mineralogical and Biological Collections in Harvard University. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950. Reprint. New York: Russell and Russell, 1967. Conant, James B. My Several Lives: Memoirs of a Social Inventor. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Copeland, Melvin T. And Mark an Era: The Story of the Harvard Business School. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1958. Cruikshank, Jeff. A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School, 1908-1945. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 1987. Curran, Jean Alonzo. Founders of the Harvard School of Public Health, with Biographical Notes, 1909-1946. New York: Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1970. Education, Bricks and Mortar: Harvard Buildings and Their Contribution to the Advancement of Learning. Cambridge: The University, 1949. Elliott, Clark A. and Margaret W. Rossiter, eds. Science at Harvard University: Historical Perspectives. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press; London and Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1992. Endowment Funds of Harvard University Cambridge: Harvard University, 1948. Fiering, Norman. Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition. Chapel Hill Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Forbes, Elliot. A History of Music at Harvard to 1972. Cambridge: Department of Music, Harvard University, 1988. http://hul.harvard.edu/huarc/bibliography.shtml 12/12/2011 Harvard University Archives : Selected Bibliography on Harvard History Page 2 of 3 Foster, Margery Somers. "Out of Smalle Beginnings.. ": An Economic History of Harvard College in the Puritan Period (1636-1712). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. Gardiner, John Hays. Harvard. New York: Oxford University Press, 1914. Goldman, Guido. A History of the Germanic Museum at Harvard University. Cambridge: Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, 1989. Hall, Max. Harvard University Press: A History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Hall, Max. Three Fifty: The Harvard Celebration of 1986 in Words and Pictures. [Cambridge, Mass.] Harvard University, 1987. Harris, Seymour E. Economics of Harvard. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1970. Harvard College Records [1636-1750]. Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vols. 15, 16, 31, 49, 50. Boston: The Colonial Society, 1925-1975. Harvard Memorial Biographies. 2 vols. Cambridge: Sever and Francis, 1866. Harvard University Quinquennial Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates, 1636-1930. Cambridge: The University, 1930. Harvard University Handbook: An Official Guide. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936. Hawkins, Hugh. Between Harvard and America: The Educational Leadership of Charles W. Eliot. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Hershberg, James. James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age. New York Knopf, 1993. Historical Register of Harvard University, 1636-1936. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1937. Howe, Daniel Walker. The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861. Revised edition, 1st Wesleyan edition. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press ; Scranton, Pa.: Distributed by Harper & Row, 1988. Heart Howells, Dorothy Ella. A Century to Celebrate: Radcliffe College, 1879-1979. Cambridge: Radcliffe College, 1978. Jr. James, Henry. Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard University, 1869- Chick 1909. 2 vols. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1930. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, [1973]. The John F. Kennedy School of Government: The First Fifty Years. Cambridge: Ballinger Publishing Company, 1986. Jones, Bessie Zaban and Lyle Gifford Boyd. The Harvard College Observatory: The First Four Directorships, 1839-1919. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. Keller, Morton and Phyllis Keller. Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America's University Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Kuklik, Bruce. The Rise of American Philosophy, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Lipset, Seymour Martin and David Riesman. Education and Politics at Harvard: Two Essays Prepared for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1975. Lives of Harvard Scholars: A Selection, 1957-1967. Cambridge: Harvard University, University Information Center, [1968]. Mead, Frederick S., ed. Harvard's Military Record in the World War. Boston: Harvard Alumni Association, 1921. Morison, Samuel Eliot, ed. The Development of Harvard University Since the Inauguration of President Eliot, 1869-1929. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930. Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Founding of Harvard College. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935. Reprint (paper, with a new foreword by Hugh Hawkins). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Morison, Samuel Eliot. Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936. Morison, Samuel Eliot. Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936. Movius, Geoffrey H., ed. The Second H Book of Harvard Athletics, 1923- 1963. Cambridge: Harvard Varsity Club, 1964. O'Connor, John T., ed. Ornament at Harvard. Cambridge: Next Publications, ca.1986. Powell, Arthur G. The Uncertain Profession: Harvard and the Search for Educational Authority. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Quincy, Josiah. The History of Harvard University. 2 vols. Cambridge: Published by John Owen, 1840. Sibley, John Langdon. Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cambridge: Charles William Sever, University Bookstore, 1873-, Vols. IV and following as: Sibley's Harvard Graduates Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College... by Clifford K. Shipton. http://hul.harvard.edu/huarc/bibliography.shtml 12/12/2011 Harvard University Archives : Selected Bibliography on Harvard History Page 3 of 3 Smith, Richard N. The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. Sollors, Werner, Caldwell Titcomb, and Thomas A. Underwood, eds. Blacks at Harvard: A Documentary History of African-American Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe. New York New York University Press, 1993. Spaulding, Walter Raymond. Music at Harvard: A Historical Review of Men and Events. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1935. Reprint. New York: DaCapo Press, Inc., 1977. Story, Ronald. The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800-1870. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1980. Sutherland, Arthur E. The Law at Harvard: A History of Ideas and Men, 1817-1967. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. Synnott, Marcia Graham. The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1900-1970. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. The Tercentennary of Harvard College: A Chronicle of the Tercentenary Year, 1935-1936. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937. Two Astronomical Anniversaries: The Harvard College Observatory Sesquicentennial [and] The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Centennial. In, Journal for the History of Astronomy 21, pt. 1 (1990). Vaille, F.O. and H.A. Clark. The Harvard Book: A Series of Historical, Biographical, and Descriptive Sketches... 2 vols. Cambridge; Welch, Bigelow and Company, 1875. Williams, George Huntston, ed. The Harvard Divinity School: Its Place in Harvard University and in American Culture. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1954. Winsor, Mary P. Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1991. Yeomans, Henry Aaron. Abbott Lawrence Lowell, 1856-1943. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948. Reprint. New York: Arno, 1977. Harvard University Library I Harvard University Archives I Records Management Services I Harvard Libraries Portal I HOLLIS Catalog I Harvard Home I Privacy Policy Copyright © 2011 The President and Fellows of Harvard College [an error occurred while processing this directive] http://hul.harvard.edu/huarc/bibliography.shtm 12/12/2011 Changing Times Page 1 of 6 Harvard Magazine Main Menu Search Current Issue Contact Archives Centennial Letters to the Editor FAQs Historic photographs courtesy Harvard University Archives Changing Times Harvard in 1898 and 1998 D. W. Butterfield's rendering of Harvard Square, 1890, shows the Law School complex to the left, Memorial Hall and tower looming over Harvard Yard, and Wadsworth House at lower right. Photograph by Michael Quan Boylston Hall was being renovated. Entering undergraduates faced new requirements for proficiency in quantitative subjects. In the classroom, the "pure lecture" progressively gave way to more involving methods of instruction. With the engineering faculties bursting out of their facilities, a new building, funded by a wealthy donor, neared construction. The Medical School overhauled its first- and second-year curricula. "Retiring allowances" helped encourage the "life-tenure corps" of professors to relinquish their posts SO their ranks could be replenished. The librarian lamented that books were dangerously exposed to fire and newspapers decayed in a damp basement "cave." Though these familiar-sounding news items could well have come from recent issues of Harvard Magazine, they in fact appear in President Charles William Eliot's report for the 1898-1899 academic year. Lest this suggest that the University remains frozen in time, elsewhere his report and those of deans and others now seem strange and remote. The veterinary faculty, for example, advocated adding a course in "dog practice" to the curriculum. The Bussey Institution, Harvard's School of Agriculture and Horticulture, had "struck root," its dean thought, "and has acquired strength enough to maintain vigorous and continuous growth which shall ensure the production in due course of abundant harvests" despite the inconvenience of lacking space to house a cow skeleton to be used for instructional purposes. The Medical School did not yet require applicants to hold a bachelor's degree. Its library augmented by the acquisition of 36 books that year--bringing the total to 2,240 volumes--the school's research focused on prevalent diseases such as tuberculosis, scarlet fever, and diphtheria. Observing from the dean's report that "three quarters of the members" of the graduate school "devote themselves to languages and the moral sciences as against one quarter who pursue mathematics and the physical and natural sciences," Eliot found that proportion "entirely in accord with the experience of Harvard College for a generation." (See the College Pump for sample questions from examinations of the period.) The Harvard University Catalogue for 1898-1899 reveals other curiosities http://128.103.142.209/issues/nd98/changing.htm 5/31/2005 Changing Times Page 2 of 6 about the state of contemporary knowledge and learning. The Arts and Sciences faculty offered four courses on Church history--and three on American history. Within the Lawrence Scientific School, Engineering 10a, "Chipping, Filing, and Fitting," instructed students on the use of hand tools; 10b, "Blacksmithing," moved to the realm of application. Pre-DNA and -relativity, there were as many undergraduate courses in geology, mineralogy, and mining as the total offerings in the life sciences, chemistry, and physics. One can only wonder about the possible audiences then and now for the series of "Lectures on the Soldier's and Sailor's Life." Academic departments being in their infancy, Harvard's "officers of instruction and government" were listed not by discipline or alphabetically but--apart from Eliot himself--"on the basis of collegiate seniority." Summarizing the work of the College Observatory, Eliot noted in passing, "On November 28, 1898, Mrs. Williamina Paton Fleming was appointed Curator of Astronomical Photographs It is believed that Mrs. Fleming is the first woman who has held an official position in Harvard University." Less celestially, he pointed to the Psychological Laboratory's "interesting" BILLS OF FARE. Memorial Hall, experiments on "the sensations, feelings, memories, instincts, and habits of the central refectory, featured waiters well-cared-for, normal turtles, newts, frogs, and fishes." and white linens. Randall Hall, a newly opened dining association, Turning from matters offered lower-cost options, including apricot pie at any meal (5 cents), six academic, the president--no fan oyster choices (15 to 25 cents), and of sports--deplored the "more mutton chops plain, breaded with and more thousands of hideous tomato sauce, with French peas, or wooden seats in high with mushrooms (20 to 35 cents). banks built every year on Eschew the à la carte delicacies in favor of the "combination meals"--14 Soldier's Field." The catalog cents for breakfast or lunch, 16 cents counseled that tuition, room, for dinner--and the student could feed board, furniture, fuel, and himself, Eliot sagely calculated, for sundries would cost College $3.08 weekly. Dining Services no students $358 for those at the as longer quotes apricot pie, but the "low" end of "annual renovated Memorial Hall has reverted to its original function. Salad bars are expenditure"; high livers, with de rigueur--Karin Alexander '02 good private rooms and lots of samples the offerings--as are "vegan fancy food and drink, could bean burritos" alongside the burgers triple the tab to $1,035. Even and hot dogs, plus hummus, tofu, yogurt, bagels and, on request, kosher allowing for a century's tuna, lactose-free and rice milk, and inflation, given today's College Reserved bill of $31,132 before Sec. 26 sunflower seeds. At breakfast, the WEST pies have yielded to Pop Tarts and considerable expenses--for Row D "lofat" muffins. MICHAEL QUAN course books, CDs, computer STAND 1 software, and intercontinental HARVARD travel--those surely were the days. PERFECT SEASONS. Harvard footballers acquitted themselves splendidly in an 11-win 1898 campaign, outscoring opponents 257 points to 19 and successively defeating STUDENT BODIES Williams, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Amherst, West Point, Newtowne A.C., Chicago A.C., Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Brown, and Yale. The In 1898, the graduate school enrolled 336 students (198 of them, or 1997 squad ran up 301 points--the most by a http://128.103.142.209/issues/nd98/changing.html 5/31/2005 Changing Times Page 3 of 6 59 percent, from Harvard College)--42.5 percent of whom had been Crimson team since 1894--on their way to a 9- born in New England, and 31.5 percent in "other Northern States 1 record and their first unbeaten, untied Ivy east of the Mississippi River." The remaining quarter of the League competition. (The league was formally students came from the American West (9 percent), Canada (7.5 organized in 1956.) But the crowd at The percent), foreign countries (5 percent), and the American South Game was only 26,264, the smallest since the (4.5 percent). war-affected 1942 contest. The College now fields 41 men's and women's varsity teams-- including powerful hockey, soccer, and squash In the fall of 1997, six schools (business, dental, design, programs--and 32 club sports, from badminton government, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and public to martial arts. HARVARD UNIVERSITY health) derived 25 percent or more of their degree students from SPORTS INFORMATION OFFICE other nations. Across the University, 2,782 international students were pursuing Harvard degrees. University matriculants that year included 10,034 men (54 percent) and 8,563 women (45 percent). Women outnumbered men in the dental, divinity, education, public health, and extension schools. Forty-two percent of the students were classified ethnically as white/non-Hispanic, 12 percent as Asian/Pacific Islander, 7 percent as black/non-Hispanic, 5 percent Hispanic, 1 percent Native American, 18 percent unknown/other, and 15 percent international. TUITION TARIFFS From shortly after the Civil War until 1916, Harvard College tuition was $150 per year. Except for medical and dental studies ($200), the graduate and the professional schools charged the same fee. If tuition rose at the same rate as the most widely known gauge of inflation, the Consumer Price Index--which it emphatically does not, because the CPI measures very different components--the $150 bill of 1898 would be only a few thousand dollars today. In fact, for the 1997-1998 academic year, the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences billed $20,600 for tuition (excluding all fees and room and board charges). For the record--take the figures as an indication of relative educational costs, a prediction of graduates' potential income, or a commentary on prevailing values--Harvard's other schools assessed the DEGREE DAYS. At following tuition bills: business, $25,000; design, $21,252; divinity, Commencement in 1898, Harvard conferred 895 degrees, including 406 $13,480; education, $19,476; government, $20,720; law, $22,800; medicine A.B.s, 39 B.S.s (a recent and dentistry, $25,200; and public health, $20,890. introduction), 107 A.M.s, 26 Ph.D.s, 138 LL.B.s, 125 M.D.s, and 36 D.M.D.s. Reflecting the Divinity School's minimal enrollment at the end of the century, the other COURSES OF STUDY graduates could turn to a paltry three new bachelors of divinity to look In 1898, Harvard enrolled 3,901 degree candidates, including 2,266 after their souls. A century later, the University awarded 6,236 degrees undergraduates (1,851 in the College, 415 in the Lawrence Scientific plus 320 certificates, including 1,563 School), a third of a thousand arts and sciences graduate students, 551 at the bachelor's rank, 433 Ph.D.s, would-be lawyers, 560 doctors-to-be, 139 aspiring dentists, and about two 538 J.D.s, 165 M.D.s, 63 dental dozen earnest apprentices each in the divinity, agricultural, and veterinary doctorates, and 175 diverse divinity programs. Separately, Radcliffe had another 411 students. http://128.103.142.209/issues/nd98/changing.htm 5/31/2005 Changing Times Page 4 of 6 A century later, the degrees. In the "newer"--twentieth- century--schools and disciplines, relative growth of the Harvard recognized the success of graduate and 859 M.B.A.s, 641 graduates in professional schools education, 544 in government, 356 in was readily apparent. public health, and 200 in the Design Adjusting for the School's architecture, landscape, and zealous scholars who urban design and planning programs. were pursuing joint degrees, 18,597 students were enrolled in the University's degree programs in the fall of 1997. Of these, 6,630--35 percent--were in the de facto coeducational College. Graduate arts and sciences students numbered nearly 3,000. In declining order, law, HOUSES OF KNOWLEDGE. Harvard's libraries, then education, and business followed, with enrollments centered in Gore Hall (above, left), totaled 956,377 volumes and pamphlets in 1898, nearly 80 percent held exceeding 1,000 apiece. The dental, design, divinity, in the College Library. Other significant collections government, medical, and public health schools each had included the law school's (56,538 items) and those of the fewer than 1,000 degree candidates. And in a sign of museum of zoology and school of divinity (37,718 and changing lifestyles, the extension school counted 944 36,157, respectively). Accessions during the academic students studying for degrees in pursuit of new careers or year numbered 24,453, as the College and departmental unfulfilled old dreams. libraries spent $20,000 for acquisitions. A century later-- excluding 8-million-plus microfilms, several million manuscripts, several million ephemera in the Theatre Collection and Houghton Library, 5-million-plus visual items, 51,000 sound recordings, and more than 500,000 maps--the libraries held 13,617,133 volumes and BACKYARD BOSTON pamphlets. Accessions totaled 266,866 items, acquired at a cost of $17,547,000. Widener (above, right) is the For all its expansive growth under Charles W. Eliot, heart of the library system. KRIS SNIBBE Harvard remained set in its provincial ways as the nineteenth century ended. The President and Fellows, Harvard's senior governing board, consisted of Eliot and Bostonians Henry Pickering Walcott, Henry Lee Higginson, Francis Cabot Lowell, Arthur Tracy Cabot, and Charles Francis Adams 2nd, treasurer. The remaining Fellow, Samuel Hoar, represented the remoter precincts: he lived in Concord. Of the 30 elected members of the Board of Overseers, 21 gave Boston, Cambridge, or suburban addresses. One of them came from Worcester, four (including Teddy Roosevelt) from New York, and, on the far-flung fringe, two from Philadelphia, one from Baltimore, and one from Chicago. The current Fellows, in addition to President Neil L. Rudenstine, include two women (Judith Richards Hope, a Washington lawyer, and Hanna H. Gray, historian and president emerita of the University of Chicago), and businessmen D. Ronald Daniel (treasurer), James R. Houghton, Richard A. Smith, and Robert G. Stone Jr.-- three from New York and one from suburban Boston. The 30 current Overseers--who meet less frequently and are less travel-constrained--come from as far away as California (where fully one-fifth of them now reside) and Alaska. LEARNING PLACES So intimate was the university community of 1898, despite Eliot's three decades of relentless expansion, that the "Map of Cambridge in the Vicinity of Harvard College" printed in the official catalog indicated the president's house and those of most senior faculty members and indexed them by number. (Indeed, in http://128.103.142.209/issues/nd98/changing.htm 5/31/2005 Changing Times Page 5 of 6 providing home addresses the catalog noted, "The residence is in Cambridge, unless otherwise stated.") The map, produced by the Scientific School's engineering department, seems oddly empty today. In the Yard, there is no Widener Library, no Memorial Church. Buildings then new have vanished without a trace--Hunt Hall, for example, which opened in 1895 to house the Fogg Art Museum and was razed in 1973 to make way for Canaday Hall (see "Freshman plus 10"). On the north bank of the Charles, the map shows only Weld Boat Club (see "The Welds of Harvard Yard") and a coal wharf--no River Houses. To the south, little appears beyond another wharf plus the "Locker Building" and Carey Athletic Building; the Stadium (1903) and the Business School campus (1926) are as yet unenvisioned. In Boston, however, one school was already thinking ahead: Eliot reports that, given the need for new physiology, histology, and pathology laboratories, "A portion of the Medical Faculty advocates the prompt sale of the land and building on Boylston Street and the transfer of the entire School to cheaper land farther from the centre of the city." That vision would eventually be realized as the Longwood campus, dedicated in 1906. THE PROFESSORATE. The Harvard University Today, the University uses 18.8 million square feet of buildings-- of 1898 could proudly demonstrate its dormitories, offices, classrooms, laboratories, libraries, museums educational eminence by detailing its pedagogical and more--in Cambridge, Boston (where future growth may staff: 92 professors, 5 associates, 37 assistants, 15 lecturers, 1 tutor, 135 instructors, 126 focus on acreage recently acquired in Allston, near the Business demonstrators and assistants--411 faculty School), central Massachusetts (the Harvard Forest), and as far members in all--plus 5 preachers, 18 curators and away as Villa I Tatti, near Florence, Italy. librarians, and 32 proctors and other academic officers. The archetype of the species was The panorama below of the Yard and Square was taken in late Charles T. Copeland, A.B. 1882, who rose from instructor to Boylston professor of rhetoric and September from the tenth floor of Holyoke Center. Much has oratory. "The lads flocked to him," wrote Samuel changed--note Widener, the Memorial Church steeple, and Eliot Morison of "Copey," caricatured above, William James Hall--but the yellow Wadsworth House is still in "and no Harvard instructor has ever accumulated place, and Harvard is still, greenery and all, recognizably SO devoted a following as his." Harvard. Now there are far more mentors to choose from. Harvard's faculty ranks in 1997 numbered 814 professors, 210 associates, 318 assistants, and 828 instructors and lecturers. An additional 7,787 full- and part-time faculty members were based in the affiliated teaching hospitals. Reflecting the broadening of disciplines and changes in classroom methods, Michael J. Aziz, Ph. D. '84, McKay professor of materials science, is shown here using a "ripple tank" to demonstrate the propagation of water waves, permitting students to visualize and understand how light travels and even "bends" around corners. HARVARD CELBEBRITES(1901); KRIS SNIBBE http://128.103.142.209/issues/nd98/changing.html 5/31/2005 REFERENCE Pilman 1. Stoughton Hall 21. Prof V.P Cooke 2. Holden Chapel 22. President Eliot 3. Hollis Hall 23. Prof. A.P. Peabody A. Harrard Hall 24. Beck Hall 5. Massachusetts Hall 25. A.Roassiz 6. Matthews Hall 26 N.D.C Hodges 7. Dane Hall 27. Prof WHNies 8. Grays Hall 28. Hiltons Block Wudsworth House 29. Holyoke House Boylston Hall 30. Littles Block Welci Hall 31. Lawrence Scientific School Gore Hall (Library) 32. New Gymnasium University Hall 33. Prof.J.B. Thayet Thayer Hall 34. Leaboxly Museun St. Appleton Chapel 35. Divirity Hall 16 Holworthy Hall 36. Zoological Museum Sever Hall Horse Railrouds Steam Railroad Old Gymnasium Memorial Hall Theatre 20. Prof.C.C. Langdell Harvard Street To Boston Bridge Couper AUBURN CENT BOS THE HELICON PREMING Harmoni Map of Harvard University, ca. 1881.