Wellesley College - History

History

Wellesley College is one of the original Seven Sisters Colleges, a group of independent female colleges founded to parallel the formerly all-male Ivy League colleges.

Wellesley was founded by Pauline and Henry Fowle Durant, believers in educational opportunity for women. Wellesley was founded with the intention to prepare women for "…great conflicts, for vast reforms in social life.” Its charter was signed on March 17, 1870 by Massachusetts Governor William Claflin. The original name of the college was the Wellesley Female Seminary, and its renaming to Wellesley College was approved by the Massachusetts legislature on March 7, 1873. Wellesley first opened its doors to students on September 8, 1875.

The first president of Wellesley was Ada Howard. There have been twelve more presidents in its history: Alice Elvira Freeman Palmer, Helen Almira Shafer, Julia Josephine Thomas Irvine, Caroline Hazard, Ellen Fitz Pendleton, Mildred H. McAfee (later Mildred McAfee Horton), Margaret Clapp, Ruth M. Adams, Barbara Wayne Newell, Nannerl Overholser Keohane (later the president of Duke University from 1993–2004), Diana Chapman Walsh, and H. Kim Bottomly.

The original architecture of the college consisted of one very large building, College Hall, which was approximately 150 meters in length and five stories in height. The architect was Hammatt Billings. From its completion in 1875 until its destruction by fire in 1914, it was both an academic building and residential building. On March 17, 1914, College Hall was destroyed by fire, the precise cause of which was never officially established. The fire was first noticed by students who lived on the fourth floor near the zoology laboratory. It has been suggested that an electrical or chemical accident in this laboratory—specifically, an electrical incubator used in the breeding of beetles—triggered the fire.

A group of residence halls, known as the Tower Court complex, are located on top of the hill where the old College Hall once stood.

After the destruction of the central College Hall in 1914, the college adopted a master plan developed by Central Park landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., Arthur Shurcliff, and Ralph Adams Cram in 1921 and expanded into several new buildings. The campus hosted a Naval Reserve Officer training program during the second World War and began to significantly revise its curriculum after the war and through the late 1960s.