History
Tabitha Brown, a pioneer emigrant from Massachusetts, immigrated to the Oregon Country over the new Applegate Trail in 1846. After arriving in Oregon she helped to start an orphanage and school along with Rev. Harvey L. Clark in Forest Grove in 1847 to care for the orphans of Applegate Trail party. In March 1848, Tualatin Academy was established from the orphanage with Clark donating 200 acres (80.9 ha) to the school. George H. Atkinson had advocated the founding of the school and with support of the Presbyterians and Congregationalists helped to start the academy. Eliza Hart Spalding, part of the Whitman Mission, was its first teacher.
The academy was officially chartered by the territorial legislature on September 29, 1849. The reverend Clark served as the first president of the board of trustees and later donated an additional 150 acres (60.7 ha) to the institution. In 1851, what is now Old College Hall was built and in 1853 Sidney H. Marsh became the school's first president. The current campus was deeded in 1851. In 1854, the institution became Pacific University. The first commencement occurred in 1863 with Harvey W. Scott as the only graduate.
In 1872, three Japanese students started at the university as part of that country's modernization movement, with the three graduating in 1876. These students were Hatstara Tamura, Kin Saito, and Yei Nosea. President Marsh died in 1879 and was replaced by John R. Herrick. In the late 1890s an alumnus gave Pacific a Chinese statuette. The statuette was purchased from a Chinese family who used it as a sort of coat of arms. It appears to be a mix of a several different mythical creatures although it is often simply called a "dragon dog" and serves as the foundation for the university's mascot, the Boxer.
Marsh Hall was built in 1895 and named for Pacific's first president, serving as the central building on Pacific's campus. Carnegie Library (now Carnegie Hall) opened in 1912 after Andrew Carnegie's foundation helped finance the brick structure. The library was designed by Portland architecture firm Whidden and Lewis. In 1915, the preparatory department, Tualatin Academy, closed due to the proliferation of public high schools in the state. By 1920, the school had grown to a total of five buildings on 30 acres (12.1 ha) and had an endowment of approximately $250,000.
Marsh Hall was gutted by fire in 1975, but its shell was preserved, and the structure reopened in 1977. Dr. Phillip D. Creighton became Pacific's sixteenth president in August 2003 and retired in June 2009. Tommy Thayer, lead guitarist of the band KISS was elected to the university's board of trustees in 2005. Pacific's seventeenth president, Dr. Lesley M. Hallick, was named on May 19, 2009.
Read more about this topic: Pacific University
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of some metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.”
—Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)