I have so many pictures that I want to share that I'm going to fill in some gaps in July.
We stopped by Stanford University as we passed through Palo Alto. This shot is of the Stanford Memorial Church, taken from The Oval - a tear=shaped lawn leading up to the Church.
Taken from the Stanford website:
The church was built as a memorial to Senator Leland Stanford, who had died in 1893; actual construction got underway six years later in 1899. The university itself had been inspired by the premature death of Stanford’s only child, Leland, Jr., who had succumbed to typhoid fever in 1884 just two months shy of his sixteenth birthday. The cornerstone at Stanford was laid in May of 1887; instruction got underway in the fall of 1891.
The church itself and much of the original campus was designed by 28 year old architect Charles A. Coolidge, a protege of Henry Hobson Richardson who had championed a Romanesque style with carved natural stone, massive columns, low rounded arch ways and red tiled roofs. The cruciform design (see the church plan) of the church (190 feet in length and 150 feed in width) incorporated an impressive clock and bell tower with an 80 foot spire.
The chief builder was a Scotsman, John McGilvray, who had been responsible for building such landmarks as the St. Francis Hotel and the City Hall complex in San Francisco before he moved to Stanford to develop the university grounds. It was McGilvray together with resident architect Charles Hodges who would lead Mrs. Stanford, fortified with her notched umbrella and sporting full length skirts, through the construction sites, even onto the highest scaffolds, to examine the various facets of the project firsthand.
