Park University - Narva Yearbook (Parkville, MO)

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What Was Not for the First Narva and Is for the Second. There is the Heating and Lighting plant: that is the latest and biggest; some are disposed to think it the best. One of the old fogies heard afar of the innovation and wrote that he feared for the temper of student life at Park College, now that there is no incentive to chop up an armload of green wood on the flat by the old well, struggle with it up the hill to Copley and, out of one corner of his eye, watch the sap fry on the end of the stick, while he occupies the other three corners in an encounter with trigonometry baked on one side and frozen on the other. The good fellow cannot under¬ stand how much more wholesome is the modern trigonometry done through and through by steam. Depend upon Professor Mattoon, anyway, to see that trigonometry is warm material. In contributing to activity of mind, health of body, and sane and wholesome religion able to rise above stove-pipe connections and smoky furnaces, the heating plant leaves nothing to be desired. And the light puts the Standard Oil company well nigh oat of commission. If it were not for the night-watch’s lantern Mr. Rockefeller might take his pro¬ posed vacation in Europe with his mind free from care. Now that your attention is fixed upon houses and such like, there is the Labor Hall, which makes it a deeper joy every day to serve God and one’s fellowmen. Everybody has heard what the house is for, but nobody knows who has not seen it and used it. It is to dignify labor and keep the laborer clean and : earty. The inst ; - tution is in large part bath appliance. There are showers and tubs, and a swimming pool, for which latter the severer weather has proved too much, but it is a great boon through all the warmer sea¬ son, and will eventually be provided with warm water the year round. The gymnasium in the building will sometime be equipped for the use of the office men and anybody else. Offices and tool and repair shops provided in the building are important new facilities of the work department. There is the President’s residence, nearing completion as this is written. The President and his family will probably be securely housed in it by the time this is in the hands of its readers. It is

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MACKAYr BUILDING The Main Lecture and Recitation Hall

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certainly time they were out of their present quarters, where they have suffered many things of many winters. This is the most im¬ posing and most commodious residence in this center of culture and art, and it occupies the most commanding site in the town. It is constructed throughout of native limestone and hard wood. The carpenters have done only superior cabinet work on the interior. The ample entrance, with the tall round columns of limestone, gives an impression at once of homelikeness and solidity. All the modern conveniences have been introduced into the equipment. The Alumni Building was the talk of the first Narva; it is now long since an accomplished fact. It is handsome, and right where it belongs. The Alumni have come back home and slept in it now and then; crowds of them have come together and eaten and lounged in it; the faculty and the classes and the literary societies and the clubs and the musical organizations and missionary societies have pow-wowed and fed and fiddled and mapped out campaigns in it. Orators have cracked the plastering overhead and around the sides; the rhetorical drill-masters live in it the most of the day; hundreds of good letters from Alumni all over the world have found their way to it. Everybody has used it a thousand times and been thankful for the chance. Some of the grading has been done for a new dormitory, and before this book is out there may have been many a hard lick struck on the site of the new Library Building. Mr. Carnegie’s fif¬ teen thousand go into the structure at once, and others will follow in later years until the equipment is ample for the greater Park Col¬ lege which is to be after not long. Then there are walks, bless their substantial dryness! There are a lot of them, granitoid for the ages, and the foundations laid for miles more. The shaping of the contour of the campus goes forward steadily. Contour in the present case is good. The campus at most points is like the land in this region, valued doubly by the farmer since he can farm both sides of it. The campus stands out each year more distinctly against the sky line. Most notable in the development of the soil has been the ad¬ vance in horticultural lines. There has been large addition to the acreage of orchard. If the promise of the present season is fulfilled there will be enough fruit of all sorts to fatten Pharaoh’s lean cat¬ tle for seven years to come, and allow eating peaches out of the hand all season through into the reckoning. There are a hundred acres of young apple trees not yet ready for serious business , 1 but with a plenty of years ahead for them to grow. The end of the world is not expected at once with all the multiplying millenial signs. When it comes to statement of funds the word of today may be to retract tomorrow. The endowment ;und is growing all the time, slowly it often seems to those most strenuously devoted to its enlargement, but growing steadily all the same. There are about