A grieving railroad tycoon built Stanford in memory of his teenage son
When Leland Stanford Jr. died of typhoid in 1884 at just 15, his parents, the railroad magnate and senator Leland Stanford and his wife Jane, decided to found a university in his name on their Palo Alto farm. It went on to help create Silicon Valley.
The Stanfords founded the school in 1885, and it admitted its first students in 1891 as a coeducational, non-denominational institution. Much of its early faculty came from Cornell, including the first two presidents, David Starr Jordan and John Casper Branner, so it was nicknamed the Cornell of the West. The founding grant asked for one-storey buildings like the old Spanish adobe houses, with deep window seats, open fireplaces and dark red tile roofs, blending Mission Revival style with English college design. Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed Cornell's grounds, laid out the campus.
Survival was not assured. After Leland died in 1893, a federal lawsuit against his estate threatened the university, and Jane insisted it keep running through the crisis. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake did heavy damage; a new library and gymnasium were torn down, and parts of Memorial Church and the Quad were never restored. Professional schools followed: medicine in 1908, after the purchase of Cooper Medical College, law from 1908, education in 1917, and business in 1925 at the urging of trustee Herbert Hoover, whose institution on war and peace began in 1919.
After the Second World War, provost Frederick Terman encouraged an entrepreneurial culture meant to build a self-sustaining local industry, the seed of Silicon Valley. Stanford Research Park, set up in 1951, was the first research park anywhere to be run by a university, and the SLAC particle physics laboratory followed in 1962.
Today the university has seven schools on an 8,180-acre campus, among the largest in the country. Its sports teams have won 136 NCAA championships and took the Directors' Cup 25 years running from 1994, while students and alumni have collected 302 Olympic medals, 153 of them gold. It counts 58 Nobel laureates and 29 Turing Award winners among its associates, and its alumni include presidents of six countries.
Source: Stanford University
