 
In
1876, former California Governor Leland Stanford purchased 650 acres of
Rancho San Francisquito for a country home and began the development of
his famous Palo Alto Stock Farm. He later bought adjoining properties
totaling more than 8,000 acres. The little town that was beginning to
emerge near the land took the name Palo Alto (tall tree) after a giant
California redwood on the bank of San Francisquito Creek. The tree
itself is still there and would later become the university's symbol and
centerpiece of its official seal.
The Stanford Family Leland
Stanford, who grew up and studied law in New York, moved West after the
gold rush and, like many of his wealthy contemporaries, made his
fortune in the railroads. He was a leader of the Republican Party,
governor of California and later a U.S. senator. He and Jane had one
son, who died of typhoid fever in 1884 when the family was traveling in
Italy. Leland Jr. was just 15. Within weeks of his death, the Stanfords
decided that, because they no longer could do anything for their own
child, "the children of California shall be our children." They quickly
set about to find a lasting way to memorialize their beloved son. The
Stanfords considered several possibilities – a university, a technical
school, a museum. While on the East Coast, they visited Harvard, MIT,
Cornell and Johns Hopkins to seek advice on starting a new university in
California. (See note regarding accounts of the Stanfords visit with
Harvard President Charles W. Eliot.) Ultimately, they decided to
establish two institutions in Leland Junior's name - the University and a
museum. From the outset they made some untraditional choices: the
university would be coeducational, in a time when most were all-male;
non-denominational, when most were associated with a religious
organization; and avowedly practical, producing "cultured and useful
citizens." On October 1, 1891,
Stanford University opened its doors after six years of planning and
building. The prediction of a New York newspaper that Stanford
professors would "lecture in marble halls to empty benches" was quickly
disproved. The first student body consisted of 555 men and women, and
the original faculty of 15 was expanded to 49 for the second year. The
university’s first president was David Starr Jordan, a graduate of
Cornell, who left his post as president of Indiana University to join
the adventure out West. The
Stanfords engaged Frederick Law Olmsted, the famed landscape architect
who created New York’s Central Park, to design the physical plan for the
university. The collaboration was contentious, but finally resulted in
an organization of quadrangles on an east-west axis. Today, as Stanford
continues to expand, the university’s architects attempt to respect
those original university plans.
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