Occidental College - La Encina Yearbook (Los Angeles, CA)

Page 11 text:

The Story of Occidental

Page 13 text:

THE STORY OF OCCIDENTAL THEY WERE PROSPEROUS, RECKLESS, UNCERTAIN DAYS. Los Angeles, twenty years emerged from the chrysalis of a pueblo town, was surging through the greatest land boom and consequent chaos Southern California was ever to know. Prolific Los Angeles County mothered sixty mushroom cities, mostly hypothetical, offering to prospective eastern buvers some eighty thousand separate pieces of real estate. Three railroads were fighting for the supremacy of service to this ballyhooed Eldorado with a California Southern time table of 1 886 advertising rates of three dollars to Kansas City and seven dollars to Chicago, and the Southern Pacific meeting this with Kansas City, two dollars. Within that scene, however, were men with purpose far sterner than the gamble of their times. In one of these men, J. G. Bell, and in the failure of another collegiate institution. Sierra Madre College, Occidental found the impetus that was the seed of its origin. Devoted to his church, and foreseeing the failure of the Sierra Madre institution, }. G. Bell presented to Rev. William Stewart Young, minister of the Bovle Heights Presbyterian Church, the idea of establishing a liberal arts college under Presbyterian direction in Southern California. This was in the autumn of 1885. That the wheels of circumstance began almost immediately to move is to be gathered from a perusal of the minute books of the Board of Presbyterian Ministers of this city. In the winter of 1885 and 1886 the following ministers, viz.: Rev. John M. Bool, Rev. Wm. J. Chichester, Rev. Wm. C. Steven, Rev. Ira M. Condit, and Rev. W. S. Young and the Sessions of the Presbyterian churches then in the city, met and conferred as to the need of an institution for higher education under Presbyterian control. The result of the meetings which were held was embodied in the following resolution passed at the meeting in the First Presbyterian Church of Los Angeles on February 15, 1886. Moved, seconded and carried that it is the sense of this meeting that steps should be taken at once, looking towards the establishment of a Presbyterian institution of learning in the cit ' . Occidental College, un-named, unrealized, was nevertheless in the womb! Almost a year