University of California Berkeley - Blue and Gold Yearbook (Berkeley, CA)

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Early Days at Berkeley This short article is for the purpose of giving a few personal reminiscences of the early days of the University, and is not in any sense a history of the institution. Being what it is. please pardon the introduction in many places of the pronoun, first person, singular. The College of Calif ornia. which antedated the establishment of the State Uni- versity by ten years, was located in Oakland, at Twelfth and Franklin Streets, and was housed in a little reddish brown building of five rooms surmounted by a square belfry. There were in California at that time six schools, at each of which it was possible for a young man to prepare for college. The first and largest of these was the College School, more familiarly known as Brayton ' s. in Oakland, and located on the parcel of ground bounded by Twelfth. Fourteenth, Franklin, and Harrison Streets, four blocks in area. The same interests that had established the College of California maintained the College School. The five other schools included the Boys ' High School in San Francisco, the Grass Valley High School, the California Military Academy in Oakland, familiarly known as McClure ' s Academy, located on the hill between Telegraph Avenue and Broadway, at Twenty-ninth Street. Santa Clara College, and the University of the Pacific, located between San Jose and Santa Clara. The writer of these few remembrances was attending McClure ' s early in the fall of 1869 and engaged in preparing for Princeton. He had never heard of the con- gressional land grant for the establishing of colleges of agriculture and mechanic arts, and knew nothing of the proposed opening of the University of California, to which had been ceded all the interests of the College of California and of the College 17

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Now, here you have scholarship, system, organization, reputation, every- thing but money ; but we, the state, have none of these things, but we have money; what a pity that they can not be brought together! To make a long story short, they were brought together, but it was only after encountering many and stubborn difficulties that the work began to move smoothly and evince vitality. The state accepted the trust and adopted the site that we had chosen for the University. Its progress halted for a period of years, but the present gratifying proportions of the University do ample credit to the state which so gener- ously assumed its support. The history of the College of California has been elsewhere published. It indi- cates the type of life in those early days, and shows how naturally it developed into the fullness of the University life, as it now is. DR. VII.I.KY. 10

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