In 1876, Mr. and Mrs. Leland Stanford bought land in the Santa Clara Valley near Palo Alto, California and started a horse farm. Leland Stanford was one of the presidents of the Central Pacific Railroad, a U.S. Senator, and the governor of California.
On a trip to Italy in 1884, the Stanfords' only child, Leland Stanford, Jr., contracted typhoid fever and died at the age of 15. To honor his memory, his parents decided to endow a university. Unlike most universities of the time, it would be co-educational, non-denominational, and dedicated to producing graduates with practical skills.
The Stanfords commissioned landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed New York's Central Park, and architect Charles Coolidge to build a university on their land in Palo Alto. Coolidge designed a Spanish-style quadrangle of buildings, anchored by a church, in a luxurious echo of California's Spanish missions. Stanford University opened in 1891.
Mrs. Jane Lathrop Stanford was a full partner with her husband in the University's development and construction. After his death in 1893, she steered the University through a financial crisis and remained in charge of its affairs until 1903. She also supported the suffragist movement and made a major contribution to women's rights by opening Stanford to female students, despite widespread criticism.
Stanford's oldest buildings, the Inner Quad, are built of a lovely, buff-colored sandstone. Tourists from all over the world take pictures of the ornate carvings and pillared walkways around the main quadrangle. The stone came by steam train on a special railroad line that Leland Stanford had built between the Greystone quarry, southeast of San Jose, and Palo Alto.
The
quarry was at the northern end of the Santa Teresa Hills in what
is now the town of Campbell. The hillside where the stonecutting
yard stood is now mostly covered with a subdivision, but you can
still see outcrops of the sandstone and partly cut blocks on a
hillside. (Directions will be added soon.)
During the Eocene epoch (58-37 million years ago), the California coast was near the Sierra Nevada, more than a hundred miles east of Campbell. The ocean covered California's Central Valley. Even now, the valley is one of the flattest places in the world, similar to the deep ocean floor. Rivers flowed down from the mountains. At the edge of the continental shelf, where Campbell is today, sand brought by the rivers built large submarine fans (like underwater deltas). Over time, the sand was buried and pressed hard enough by the weight of the overlying sediments to turn into sandstone. Later, movement along faults lifted the sandstone into a ridge--the Santa Teresa Hills.