100 Years Ago (1905)
Jane Lathrop Stanford died in Honolulu on February 28 at age 76. Six weeks before, at her San Francisco home, she had drunk from a glass of water that was found to contain suspicious amounts of strychnine (small amounts were routinely used in some medicines at the time). In Honolulu, doctors and police believed strychnine poisoning to be the cause of death, and a coroner’s jury ruled she was poisoned with “felonious intent.” No suspects were arrested or charged. A later autopsy of her heart performed by doctors in California declared the cause of death a ruptured coronary artery. That report cannot be found, and the controversy continues. A crowd of 6,000 overflowed Memorial Church into the Inner Quad at the funeral on March 24. Mourners walked down Palm Drive to the mausoleum, where Mrs. Stanford’s coffin was laid between those of her husband and son. Varsity football players served as pallbearers.
At Palm Drive and El Camino Real, sandstone entry gates in the style of the Quad portals replaced modest pillars and fences.
75 YEARS AGO (1930)
On March 13, the 46th anniversary of Leland Stanford Jr.’s death, members of the Class of 1907 installed a memorial plaque on the Grand Hotel in Florence, Italy, where he died.
50 YEARS AGO (1955)
Trustees announced that the new dormitory under construction across from Branner Hall would be named for the late president Ray Lyman Wilbur. It was slated to hold 704 freshman men, as a replacement for Encina Hall, which was shifted to administrative use.
Florence Moore of Atherton donated $1 million toward construction of a 350-bed women’s dormitory between the Knoll and the post office. Her gift, at that time the second largest from a living individual, would help alleviate the women’s housing shortage.
25 YEARS AGO (1980)
The Faculty Senate approved the biggest curriculum change in a decade. The change included a new Western culture requirement based on readings from the Great Works, as well as seven additional distribution requirements: literature and the fine arts; philosophical, social and religious thought; human development, behavior and language; social processes and institutions; mathematical sciences; natural sciences; and technology and applied sciences. In the past decade, since elimination of a Western civilization requirement, enrollment in humanities courses had dropped dramatically.
History Corner, built in 1903, was renovated in its original style at a cost of $8 million. Seminars on “New Directions in History at Stanford” followed the rededication ceremony on February 8.
KAREN BARTHOLOMEW, ’71, writes this column on behalf of the Stanford Historical Society (histsoc.stanford.edu).
