Historic Photos of Harvard University

By Dana Bonstrom

Founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1636, Harvard University ranks as the oldest and arguably the nation’s most prestigious institution of higher learning. But in 1781, at the end of the Revolution, the college endured a challenging period with only five professors and two hundred students. From that modest beginning, Harvard has been a testament to visionary leadership that has resulted in one of the world’s leading institutions of learning. See the development and evolution of Harvard over the last century in this pictorial recollection of key events, landmark structures, generous benefactors, and the dedicated presidents who created the legacy. Nearly 200 photographs reproduced in vivid black-and-white, written and captioned by Dana Bonstrom, revisit the storied past of one of the world’s premier universities. A natural companion to the college annual of every alum, Historic Photos of Harvard University belongs in the library of every graduate and all those devoted to America’s favorite ivy-league school.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Nov 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781618583963

Book preview

HISTORIC PHOTOS OF

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

TEXT AND CAPTIONS BY DANA BONSTROM

A 1907 view of the Charles River and Soldiers Field, likely taken from the chimney of the coal plant where Eliot House now stands. Newell Boathouse (1900, at right) was the first permanent boathouse on the Charles, followed by Weld Boathouse (lower left) in 1906. The drawbridge shown here was replaced with the Anderson Memorial Bridge in 1915.

HISTORIC PHOTOS OF

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

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Historic Photos of Harvard University

Copyright © 2009 Turner Publishing Company

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This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009922627

ISBN: 978-1-59652-541-2

Printed in China

09 10  11  12  13  14  15  16—0  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE

HARVARD BEFORE ELIOT (1636–1869)

THE ELIOT YEARS (1869–1909)

THE LOWELL YEARS (1909–1933)

THE CONANT YEARS (1933–1953)

THE PUSEY YEARS (1953–1971)

THE BOK YEARS (1971–1991)

NOTES ON THE PHOTOGRAPHS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Harvard Rowing Club on the Charles River, 1858. The first intercollegiate athletic event in the United States took place on August 3, 1852, when Harvard and Yale crew teams first competed. The crew pictured here included four undergraduates and two recruited faculty members: Alexander Agassiz (Class of 1855), who would succeed his father, Louis, as curator and director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology; and Charles W. Eliot (Class of 1853), Harvard’s future president.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume, Historic Photos of Harvard University, is the result of the cooperation and efforts of many individuals and organizations. It is with great thanks that we acknowledge the valuable contribution of the following for their generous support:

Harvard University Archives

Harvard University Archives, Harvard Law School

Harvard University Archives, Teddy Roosevelt Collection

The Library of Congress

Radcliffe College Archives, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

PREFACE

I write this in the Stacks Reading Room of Widener Memorial Library on a warm, sunny day in May 2009. Outside Widener, in the broad expanse of Tercentenary Theatre, crews are hoisting a canopy over the steps of Memorial Church; hanging banners emblazoned with the College’s arms between Widener’s monumental columns; and arranging thousands of chairs in long rows that will eventually cover nearly every inch of Harvard Yard’s well-worn lawns and eccentric web of walking paths.

Commencement Exercises and the annual Alumni Meeting are next week; next week, at this time, more than 30,000 students, family, friends, officers, alumni, and assorted interested parties will gather here to witness annual rites that have been observed at Harvard, nearly without interruption, since the first graduating class commenced in 1642.

On this beautiful spring day tourists—hundreds of them—traverse the Yard, snapping photos of one another—with cameras or phones—in front of John Harvard’s statue; under the whispering arch of Sever Hall; and, of course, on the grand steps of Widener. Tour guides relate the meanings and history of this special place, stories I’ve heard now a thousand times: how troops of George Washington’s Continental Army, garrisoned at the College in 1775, stripped lead from the roof of Harvard Hall to fashion musket balls; why the tribute to John Harvard in front of University Hall is called the statue of three lies; how Widener Memorial Library was built in memory of a young Harvard graduate tragically lost on the Titanic.

More than one guide will, inevitably, recount the myth of the Harvard Swim Test: how Eleanor Elkins Widener, as a condition of her gift of the library, insisted that the University require all undergraduates to pass a swimming test as a safeguard against the watery fate of her son, Harry. A good story—a stubbornly persistent one—but not true.

Harvard is a magnet for visitors because—beyond its reputation as the oldest, and arguably the finest, institution of higher learning in North America—it is one of the few preserved environments from the earliest days of this early outpost in the New World. One arrives at Harvard with the expectation of encountering genuine vestiges of pre-Colonial America—an authentic Williamsburg or Plimouth Plantation, in a sense. That is possible, of course—if one stands just so in the northwest corner of the Old Yard and limits one’s gaze to Massachusetts Hall (built in 1718), Holden Chapel (1742), Hollis Hall (1762), and Harvard Hall (1764).

Beyond that small corner of a sprawling presence, the University reveals itself through centuries of expansion, improvements, shifting priorities, and—to a significant degree—its own evolving self-image. It is a remarkable, and remarkably successful, balancing act: Harvard presents itself at once as a guardian of history—its own and the Republic’s—and as an exemplar of the modern research university, moving forcefully and confidently into the twenty-first century.

This balancing act extends to the adaptation of existing historical assets to modern needs and uses. The days of wholesale demolition to make way for new structures are, for the most part, long past. Consider this room in which I am presently writing: an elegant, reverential place, a skylit cathedral-like space more than four stories tall, populated by handsome reading tables and comfortable wing chairs, encircled by tall bookcases bearing bound folios of the Union Catalogue. I look across through arched mullioned windows into the domed, marble-clad Entrance Hall of the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Room. It’s possible, for a moment, to imagine Thomas Wolfe seated opposite me, scribbling furiously into notebooks from which Max Perkins would one day extract Look Homeward, Angel.

Except that this space, when Wolfe was an undergraduate—when I was an undergraduate, for that matter, in the dim, distant 1970s—was an air shaft, open to the sky and largely neglected. It became a reading room only in the aftermath of a comprehensive renovation of Widener, completed in 2004. The presence of the Union Catalogue is more aesthetic than practical: using the library’s WiFi network I can search for and locate any book, manuscript, photograph—any document, regardless of medium—among the millions of documents in the Harvard library system.

So it goes. Emblazoned on those banners billowing out between Widener’s columns is the single word Veritas. Truth. The guardians of Harvard’s legacy might, one day, consider adding the old adage plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

And, perhaps, parenthetically—in acknowledgment of Harvard’s unique ability to balance its past with its future—the words et Vice Versa.

—Dana Bonstrom

Wadsworth House, seen here in 1904, was constructed in 1726 as the residence of Harvard’s eighth president, Benjamin Wadsworth (1725–1737).