In the Beginning

Founding Visions

February 6, 2018 By Carolyn

Plot Plan Scheme B, 1935 (University Archives, click to enlarge)

Jacobberger & Smith Map legend (enhanced), 1927 (University Archives, click to enlarge)

When our school began, West Hall stood alone high on the Bluff. By agreement between the founders Archbishop Alexander Christie and Fr. John Zahm, C.S.C., a condition for passing ownership and control of the University from the Archdiocese to the Congregation of Holy Cross was the construction of a significant, permanent building on the campus grounds within ten years of the transfer of title. In 1911, Christie Hall became the second brick-and-stone building on the Bluff (named as thank-you for the Archbishop’s unstinting support of the school and students).

1927 detail, Gothic Chapel and Bluff river-stairs (University Archives, click to enlarge)

Growth continued and the next major facilities investment was marked with the construction of Howard Hall in 1927. We have sketches from that date showing the first grand plan for campus development (amber map, above). The proposed Gothic academic village complements the brand new sports / auditorium / convocation center. Clearly an ambitious project, the plan proposes a Law School as campus anchor, and even razes one of the existing stone buildings. (There were only three, blithely erasing West Hall (1891), the one building paid for at the time.)

This 1927 plan never happened, at least not along those lines. West, renamed as Waldschmidt Hall, is still in use today. Yet further growth and expansion was not long delayed, with Science Hall dedicated and open for instruction in 1937.

Plotting the location for Science Hall meant rethinking the campus plan once again. The visionary 1935 plan (blue, above) was discovered lurking within forgotten filing cabinets during the Howard Hall demolition. The track and field & football stadium facility has been lost from ’27-’37, but the tennis courts (included on this plan) have been a continuing campus feature ever since! Also notice, our Science building, Romanaggi Hall since 2010, wasn’t in fact dropped into the location where the blue-scheme wanted it to be. Passing another decade, the Engineering School is realized in brick and concrete in 1947.

Happily the aerial records of the campus show that a dedicated track and a baseball diamond were de facto features of campus from the earliest days; there was never a need of ‘plans’ to ensure our students fielding and supporting athletic teams.

A previous museum blog post related to this topic:
In the Beginning: Day One

In the Beginning: Rev. John A. Zahm, CSC: Name-dropper, Promise Keeper

November 13, 2014 By Carolyn

Zahm Telegram ZGx3.42 1902 (University Archives, click to enlarge)

It was Fr. John Zahm, CSC who was Provincial Superior when Archbishop Christie first looked to the Holy Cross community to provide staffing and leadership on the Bluff. After a hasty survey visit to the Northwest in January of 1902, Fr. Zahm agreed to the deal, swiftly dispatched a team of priests and brothers, such that the new and improved Columbia University was in-session on the Bluff by the time of his second visit in December of that same year. Speaking before the student body and guests, he pronounced that the school’s “future is secure and it is only a question of a few years before it would take the more foremost rank among the educational institutions on the Pacific Coast. He announced that he had his architect working on the plans for a new Hall, and also on a new library building. Schools of Law, Medicine and Technology will follow, he said, in a very few years.”

The report on Fr. Zahm’s reception and welcome appears in the December 1902 issue of The Columbiad, the precursor student publication of the BEACON. The report concludes: “We trust that it was only the beginning of those happy occasions that will make Columbia known far and wide as the New Notre Dame” (volume I, issue 3, p. 47).

In 2014 the University of Portland, for the 20th consecutive year, received a top-ten ranking by U.S. News & World Report. In the magazine’s “2015 America’s Best Colleges” issue, the University of Portland is ranked 8th out of 114 institutions listed in the “Regional Universities – West” classification. So in the meantime, it seems as if we are doing quite well.

For further, see James T. Covert, A Point of Pride: The University of Portland Story, pp. 34-37.

Rev. John Zahm, C.S.C. and Theodore Roosevelt, 1915 Christmas Roosevelt File1082

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Rev. John Zahm, C.S.C. and Theodore Roosevelt, 1915 Christmas Roosevelt File1082 (University Archives)

In the Beginning: cornerstone West Hall

August 21, 2014 By Carolyn

On August 24, 1891 the cornerstone of West Hall was dedicated in a public ceremony, the public promise of the foundation that would grow to become our University of Portland community. West Hall was the first building on the University campus. Originally the home of the Methodist-sponsored Portland University (1891-1899), Archbishop Christie acquired the building and land on July 20, 1901 for the new Columbia University which opened September 5, 1901. West Hall was designated a National Landmark in 1977. At its century mark, West Hall received a major refurbishing and renovation and was renamed Waldschmidt Hall on October 17, 1992.

For more pictures and history of West/Waldschmidt Hall visit the Clark Library’s Digital University Building Collection, displaying 64 images of photographs and objects held by the University Archives and Museum (with descriptions from the Archives and Museum).

In the Beginning: another day

July 16, 2014 By Carolyn

On July 22, 1901 the campus property of the old Portland University became the property of the Archdiocese of Oregon City under the title of Columbia University. That is, transferring West Hall and some few adjacent yards of orphaned land. The Archdiocese later ceded the same property to the Indiana Province of the Congregation of Holy Cross. Since 1902, the Congregation of Holy Cross has been the bedrock of the ever expanding University, beginning with the first Holy Cross priest-president, Fr. Michael Quinlan to its twentieth President, Fr. Mark Poorman, and the hundreds of Holy Cross Fathers and Brothers who have served the student community in classrooms and residence halls, entered student lives, and rejoiced in the strength, faith, and friendship of the University of Portland community.

And yes, the campus has also expanded geographically since 1901, but that is the less important factor.

The University honored the men of Holy Cross in a proclamation issued by the Board of Regents in 2000; giving thanks for a century of commitment by the priests and brothers of the Congregation of Holy Cross at the University of the Portland. A framed list of Holy Cross members who have served at the University since its founding is on display in Holy Cross Lounge on the third floor of Franz Hall and is also available here: Holy Cross at UP list, 2013

In the Beginning: day one

July 16, 2014 By Carolyn

On July 20, 1901, Alexander Christie, Archbishop of Oregon City, entered into an agreement to purchase from the University Land Co. a building and twenty-eight acres of land on Waud’s Bluff under the conditions that “a school be conducted and a major building erected within ten years” (James Covert, Point of Pride, p. 33).

Portland University, Main entrance road along the Bluff, ca1892

The original purchase brought us what is now Waldschmidt Hall, built in 1891. Entrance to the university was via a simple dirt drive which skirted along the top of the bluff. Both the 1891 building and that back access road, since paved, are still in use; fixed features of the University of Portland campus since the very first. In a hurry to comply with the purchase agreement, classes began September 5, 1901 but the ‘new’ building was not to arrive until 1911, when Christie Hall was constructed and named to honor the archbishop’s initiative in founding the University.

The familiar Willamette main entrance and circular campus drive belong to the 1960s. Major reconstruction of the entrance began in June, 2014.

“In Memoriam: Schulte Lake” by Brian Doyle, University of Portland Facebook post, June 24, 2014 (used with permission)

The University finally, after many years of pondering the matter, is building a new front entrance to campus – a vast project which will be finished in August, just before the biggest freshman class in 113 years arrives. It will be glorious, the new front drive. It will be impressive, as befits a fine university grown greatly in confidence and renown. It will be more welcoming, much clearer signage-wise, much more of a statement, even a marketing endeavor. It makes sense, and things like campus entryways must change and morph and mature, like any other entity; so that while alumni of a certain age still mourn the little stone bus-shelter that once crouched at one side of the front gate, and younger alumni still remember with affection the day the front sign read UNIVESITY OF PORTLAND after an R seceded overnight, some older members of the staff and faculty will remember an oddly persistent dip in the road, just as you drove your wheezing vehicle onto campus: the famous, or infamous, Schulte Lake, a remarkable space on this earth that instantly filled with six inches of water in any rain whatsoever, from the merest drizzle to the usual steady weeping of winter. For nearly fifty years the powers-that-be on The Bluff fought Schulte Lake, filling it in, paving it over, paving it a tenth and twentieth time, but never would it surrender, not even to the express command and herculean efforts of the legendary Arthur Schulte, long the vice president in charge of pretty much everything at the University. Again and again and again Art sent his agents against Schulte Lake, and they returned triumphant to report its demise, and as soon as the sky glowered and a mist arose the lake filled again, and cars and small dogs were lost in its depths; but come this August we can only assume the lake is gone at last, and while that will be an excellent state of affairs for cars and small dogs, and for the startled passersby who were again and again caught by waves of splashage from cars gunning desperately for the other shore, a small subtle piece of the University’s past will be gone too, receding gently like the lake did under the occasional sunburst; so let us pause a moment this morning, and remember that insistent water, and the dedicated man for whom it was named, and all those little stories that make up the University’s long and colorful tale, long may it wag.