Did You Know?

Harvard is perhaps best-known because of its long and venerable history. But even die-hard Harvard buffs are not likely to know all of these historical snippets. . . .

1607 - John Harvard, the College's future namesake and first benefactor, was baptized at St. Saviour's Church (now Southwark Cathedral), London.

1635 - John Harvard received his M.A. from Cambridge University, England.

Late 1637 or early 1638 - the Overseers purchased the College's first piece of real estate: a house and an acre of land from Goodman Peyntree. Located on the southern edge of "Cow-yard Row" and soon distinguished as the "Colledge Yard," this tract became the nucleus of present-day Harvard Yard and remains at the southern end of the Old Yard (the area west of Thayer, University, and Weld halls).

1649 - The Town of Cambridge and President Henry Dunster gave Harvard the "College Farm" at Billerica, Mass., which paid annual rent to the College until the farm was sold in 1775.

1653 - John Sassamon, a Massachuset Indian, became the first known Native American to study at Harvard (probably for a term or so). A disciple of Indian Bible translator John Eliot, Sassamon later became a scribe and interpreter to Wampanoag Chief Metacom (a.k.a. Metacomet, Pometacom, King Philip). In 1675, Sassamon was murdered as an English informant, touching off King Philip's War, New England's most devastating conflict between Natives and newcomers.

1780 - The Massachusetts Constitution went into effect and officially recognized Harvard as a university. The first medical instruction given to Harvard students in 1781 and the founding of the Medical School in 1782 made it a university in fact as well as name.

1782 - Twenty-nine-year-old John Warren was appointed Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at the Medical School. During the previous year while head of the army hospital in Boston, he had given Harvard students their first formal medical instruction. Benjamin Waterhouse was named to a second Medical School professorship, in the "Theory and Practice of Physic."

1783 - With high ceremony, Harvard Medical School officially opened as the "Medical Institution of Harvard University." Its first home was the ever-versatile Holden Chapel.

1791 - A writer in the Boston press accused Harvard of poisoning students' minds with Edward Gibbon's monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88). President Joseph Willard replied that far from even considering Gibbon, the College used a text by French historian AbbŽ Millot. Nathaniel Ames, who left Harvard around 1812, recalled Millot's as "the most utterly worthless and contemptible work of that kind or any other extant."

1832 - Dane Hall, the Law School's first new building, was formally dedicated in Harvard Yard and served for more than half a century thereafter.

1849 - Dr. George Parkman disappeared at the Medical School in one of the most famous murder cases in Harvard history. Earlier, Parkman had lent money to colleague Dr. John White Webster. To secure the loan, Webster gave Parkman a mortgage on his personal property, including a valuable collection of minerals. When Parkman learned that Webster had backed another loan with the same collection, he began relentlessly pursuing Webster to collect the debt. A week after the disappearance, a suspicious janitor broke through a brick vault below Webster's lab and found human body parts, which the authorities soon discovered all around the lab. Found guilty of first-degree murder, Webster belatedly confessed and appealed for clemency, but was hanged on Aug. 30, 1850. Parkman's widow led a fund drive to support Webster's wife and children.

1862 - The Overseers confirmed the Rev. Thomas Hill, Class of 1843, as Harvard's 20th President. His brief tenure brought higher admissions standards, a series of public "University Lectures" (est. 1863) by distinguished Harvard and non-Harvard scholars that paved the way for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and University Extension, and progress toward a system of elective courses. Hill also conducted nationwide searches for new faculty appointees.

1867 - The Harvard Dental School made its first appointments: Daniel Harwood, professor of dental pathology and therapeutics; and Nathan Cooley Keep, professor of mechanical dentistry.

1869 - At the meetinghouse of First Church, Unitarian, Charles William Eliot was formally installed as Harvard's 21st President. From the outset, Eliot's 105-minute address delineated his broad educational purposes: "The endless controversies whether language, philosophy, mathematics, or science supplies the best mental training, whether general education should be chiefly literary or chiefly scientific, have no practical lesson for us to-day. This University recognizes no real antagonism between literature and science, and consents to no such narrow alternatives as mathematics or classics, science or metaphysics. We would have them all, and at their best."

1870 - The Rev. Phillips Brooks laid the cornerstone of Memorial Hall.

1873 - Charles Sprague Sargent officially began a 54-year term as first director of the Arnold Arboretum (est. 1872). Sargent soon enlisted the aid of pioneering landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted - then busy designing the Boston park system - to help him lay out the grounds. "Olmsted immediately grasped the idea that an arboretum where the public could see varied plantations of rare and exotic trees and shrubs skilfully [sic] selected, artistically arranged, and grown under scientific oversight, would not only be an appropriate feature in the park system [now known as Boston's "Emerald Necklace"] but might well become its culminating attraction," Benjamin Lincoln Robinson, the Asa Gray Professor of Systematic Botany, wrote in the late 1920s. Nonetheless, the Arboretum proved a hard sell, Robinson noted. "Neither the City [of Boston] nor the Harvard Corporation welcomed the idea. The press was indifferent, and the public apathetic. Nine years of persistent effort were required before it was possible to draft a plan of procedure acceptable both to the City and to the University and to secure its approval by the General Court of Massachusetts."

1875 - New Haven, Conn., hosted the first Harvard-Yale football game, which Harvard won, to the delight of some 150 student boosters from Cambridge.

1908 - With 59 students, the Graduate School of Business Administration formally opened as a Graduate Department of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Through this initial connection to established departments, President Eliot and Dean Edwin Francis Gay hoped to get the newcomer off to a well-supported start. Other U.S. universities began offering business training as early as 1886, but the course of study was overwhelmingly undergraduate. In seeking to establish business as a profession, Harvard Business School became the country's first business program limited to college graduates. By the end of the first academic year, the School had 80 students (regular and special) from 14 colleges and 12 states.

1910 - Theodore Roosevelt, Class of 1880, served as the 34th president of the Harvard Alumni Association (est. 1840).

1914 - Henry Cabot Lodge, Class of 1871, served as the 38th president of the Harvard Alumni Association (est. 1840).

1920 - The College Library contained about 1,127,500 volumes.

1920 - The Business School issued Marketing Problems, its first case book, developed by Marketing Professor Melvin Thomas Copeland.

1924 - The Harvard-Boston (Egyptian) Expedition began excavation of the royal cemetery of King Cheops (Khufu) near the Great Pyramid and soon identified the tombs of Prince Kawa'ab (Cheops's eldest son), four other princes, Princess Meresankh II, and two pyramid priests.

1943 - Two hundred Army Quartermaster officers arrived at the Business School for a three-month intensive course in business methods. They formed a new unit of lieutenants and captains known as the Army Supply Officers' Training School, a counterpart to the Navy Supply Corps School.

1943 - The Harvard Alumni Bulletin tally of Harvard men in active military service equaled "the mythical 10,000 men of Harvard." Seventy-eight Harvard men had been killed in the line of duty, 20 were missing in action, and another 20 were prisoners of war.

1945 - At the Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond, Calif., the 10,800-ton SS Harvard Victory was launched as the first of a new series of U.S. Maritime Commission ships named after U.S. educational institutions. The Harvard Corporation later voted to give the ship a library of about 140 volumes selected by the American Merchant Marine Library Association. A simple plaque acknowledged the University's gift.

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