In 1915, the university sparked outrage when it relocated a statue of Stanford’s founding family from Memorial Court, at the entrance to the Main Quad, to the protective environs of the school’s art museum. In the eyes of the student newspaper, then named the Daily Palo Alto, it was a “radical” mistake. The statue had been a campus centerpiece since its arrival from Italy more than a dozen years earlier. Jane Stanford herself had selected its location. Now, a decade after her death, it was being cast off, denying the Stanford faithful access to “a tribute to the founders, whom they love.” In their anger, Daily editors waxed poetic: “She placed it there in love and pride, / At Learning’s Golden Gate, / No ruthless whim, no vagrant hand / Her shrine should desecrate.”
Their ardor earned a snippy reader reply. What was the big deal about moving one memorial at a university that was itself a giant memorial? Besides, the statue in question wasn’t even the memorial of Memorial Court. That memorial was a plaque on its west wall, a salute to the 80-some Stanford men who fought—two of whom died—in the Spanish-American War in 1898.
Today, Memorial Court is both hallowed ground—one of two places where Stanford marks Veterans Day with a wreath dedication—and a reminder of a fledgling university still finding its way forward.
It sustained a monumental loss.
Memorial Court was destined to be prime real estate by location alone. As the gateway to the Main Quad, the court is the antechamber between the university’s inner sanctum and the world beyond. (Another strike against the weathering statue: It obstructed the view of Palm Drive.) When the U.S. Postal Service marked Stanford’s centennial with a commemorative postcard, they chose Memorial Court over images of Memorial Church and Hoover Tower.
In the university’s early days, the threshold to the court was made more dramatic by Memorial Arch, a hulking tower that loomed over its entrance like a giant castle keep. There was no mystery behind this memorial. “To the memory of Leland Stanford Junior,” it said in sandstone at its base. “Erected by his mother, 1899.” The arch would scarcely outlive Mrs. Stanford. The 1906 earthquake delivered a death blow, and the remains fell to wrecking crews months later.
Its monument did a president proud.
In 1903, the war plaque drew the attention of a visitor intimately tied to the Spanish-American War: President Theodore Roosevelt, whose exploits as a Rough Rider charging up San Juan Hill five years earlier had supercharged his political career. “I am proud as an American college man myself to have seen the tablet outside within the court which shows that this young university sent 85 of her sons to war when the country called for them,” Roosevelt told the crowd at Assembly Hall.
It marked wars—for a while.
For a moment, the plaque seemed to set a precedent for future war memorials at Stanford. In the summer of 1916, an alum from the Class of 1908 and a former French professor became the first Stanford men to die in World War I. Each was honored with a plaque in the court’s northeast corner. But they were European-born men who’d died for their native nations in a war that was still almost exclusively European.
With American entry to the conflict in 1917, thousands of Stanford men and women were soon in service; 77 would lose their lives. In 1919, a committee convened to discuss how to honor such great sacrifice—building a “living fountain” for the Inner Quad, perhaps, or planting an avenue of trees. They settled on constructing Memorial Auditorium, which would finally be finished in 1937. For reasons unknown, a planned plaque for the court never materialized. The names of all Stanford’s war dead, then and since, are inscribed on plaques in MemAud.
It’s home to two one-offs.
Only one other monument to the dead would be added to the court. In 1926, a commemorative tiled drinking fountain was built in memory of Harold McAllister, Class of 1926, who’d drowned at a local beach toward the end of his junior year. His mother paid for it using money her son had set aside for his tuition.
Three years later saw the addition of a final plaque, this one recognizing the 50th anniversary of photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s trailblazing work using stop-action photography to capture images of trotting horses on Leland Stanford’s stock farm. The work, a precursor to motion pictures, is undeniably important but incongruent to the setting. “Who knows what they were thinking?” says Julie Cain, a historic preservation planner at Stanford. She says a second plaque to the event—located near the Red Barn—is the more understandable place to mark the moment.“That’s where that stuff happened.”
Its OG statue nearly staged a comeback.
After Muybridge, Memorial Court got out of the new memorial business. But in 1987, it almost reacquired an old one after an idea was floated to relocate the statue of the Stanford family out of storage—where it had been for 20 years, after a series of moves—and back into the court. The proposal went nowhere, not least because people balked at the statue’s depiction of Mrs. Stanford as subservient, kneeling as her son and husband stood tall. Also, the statue was widely viewed as unattractive—an opinion apparently shared by Jane Stanford herself. In 1998, it finally found a permanent home beside the Mausoleum, where the Stanford family rests.
It brought the Burghers back together.
Photo: Sheldon Breiner/Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries
That same year, Memorial Court saw one more significant change: the reunification of all six sculptures in Auguste Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais. The statues memorialize men who offered themselves as hostages during the Hundred Years’ War to spare their city from siege. Four of the figures had stood in the corners of the court since the 1980s, while the other two were elsewhere on campus. The move reunited them according to Rodin’s vision of the men as “exemplars of heroism, civic virtue, and self-sacrifice,” says Bernard Barryte, retired chief curator of European art at the Cantor Arts Center, who oversaw their placement. The statues are at ground level, without pedestals, so that viewers might be inspired while walking among them. “They were situated there because it is a place of remembrance and therefore appropriate for the message,” Barryte says.
Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford. Email him at sscott3@stanford.edu.
