Upon mature consideration I find it impossible to recommend any position West of the old range of College buildings as a site for the proposed College Church. As between the two sites suggested, one on the East side of the Trummock upon which Wood’s Cabinet stands, the other on the North West side of the same, near the corner of the college property, the latter is decidedly the more objectionable. The cabinet building can hardly be expected to remain permanently. When it is gone, a church standing in the position referred to would group with nothing and align with nothing else in its vicinity. It would seem to have been shouldered into a corner where it would be completely detached from the college and be but awkwardly related to the village. [For it must be observed that the] buildings which belong to the college corporation on the west side of the village green do not in the least appear as a part of the College. Architecturally speaking, it is the village, not the college which benefits by them. The same would be true of a church spire rising at the point in question.

In the other position, Wood’s Cabinet being removed and the Trummock raked down, a church would be a central and dominating object to the village green on both sides. It would group beautifully with the only really beautiful objects in the immediate vicinity, the trees on the slopes and the southern green. Its relation with the old college buildings would not be very symmetrical or harmonious but less strikingly otherwise I think than if it were at any other point south of the face of the terrace. If I were obliged to assume that the College had never “got its growth”, that the village was always henceforth to be just what it is now, and that what are just now the beaten tracks of the students and the faculty were never to be departed from, I should think this position South of the Cabinet invited more advantages than any other. I hope that you will excuse me, however, if I decline to be controlled by these assumptions and discuss the question freely and comprehensively.

As the management of a College renews its youth from time to time, there is no reason why its forms of usefulness should ever decline with age. On the other hand as with every generation something must be added to its accumulation of means, the older it grows, the better it should serve its purpose. Consequently there is every reason why a college once founded and well set a going should be maintained. It would be faithless and shameful to [370]

Plan for Expansion of Amherst College Campus, 1870

[371]

When your college was founded, Amherst was a small rural village remote from navigation or other thronged ways of men. The original college buildings were placed on the brow of a hill standing detached from the village and were made to front so as to appear to the best advantage from the direction in which they would first be seen by observers approaching upon or from the nearest route of general public travel. The banks of the Connecticut then held the importance almost of a sea coast, so that the region to the Eastward of Amherst hill would be often referred to as the back country.

But, when at length, with difficulty, hesitation and by successive stages an important railroad thoroughfare was established on the East side of the village, it necessarily disarranged affairs. It is already plain that the village is changing front. Not only so but an advancing movement has been forced upon it. Owing to the strongly fixed habits of the old rural inhabitants, the change is of course not rapid but that it has begun and is irresistable is perfectly evident. The village is no longer rural and retired. Hundreds now take Amherst on their way and see it in passing where one did so fifty years ago, and most who have occasion to refer to the Connecticut valley in connection with the village speak of it as “over back of the town”. It is reasonable to suppose that before the college is much older, the revolution will have been completed. There is not the slightest ground for expecting a return to the original state of things.

As to the future of the College, it must move likewise—not rapidly but surely and continuously. Even if the number of its undergraduates should not be materially enlarged, it will undoubtedly receive a more elaborate equipment and gain in all the desiderata of a seat of learning and of Science. Every ten or twenty years some notable addition or improvement will be made.

The buildings which have been recently added to the College Series are much finer and make much more impression upon the mind of an observer than the old ones, which consequently, and especially as they more commonly [are] seen now [by strangers] behind them, seem designed to stand in the background. None of the recent and more imposing buildings face to the Westward. Clearly the college has begun to face about like the town.

In the next step or two of your progress, you may try to conform to the original theory or you may go on in a desultory way putting down a building merely according to the convenience of the moment without any concern for general effects or permanent convenience, but you cannot go far in either way without running into confusion and embarrassment; the college will be lost in the midst of the village of which it will be an undivided part. The only way in which you can avoid this is to accept the necessity of a change of the [372] old idea of a single front on the main street of the village and toward the Connecticut river, and a back yard on the other side.

Looking ahead, at all beyond our own time, the old range of brick buildings is, except for historical associations, extremely uninteresting and of little value. The new buildings, including those to be erected during the next century or two, will certainly engage the eye and impress the mind a great deal more than the old ones. Some of the new ones will almost certainly stand to the Eastward of the present brick range in positions equally elevated. If there is any considerable body of buildings to the Westd, it will be on lower ground and will be seperated from the main body by a public street. The roads or walks connecting the two bodies of buildings must be laid out mainly in a direction diagonal to their fronts which would still further tend to produce an effect of disunity of design and confusion—disorganization.

The remedy is to be found by freeing the mind from the associations established by circumstances which have been superceded; disencumber your plans from regard to the few buildings—comparatively unimportant with reference to the future—which awkwardly dovetail it to the village, cut loose from the village altogether as well as the Connecticut river and build the college up by itself about a centre of its own.

If it must be conceived of as fronting one way more than another, it should be faced about, as the village has been, toward the rail road, approaching strangers and the rising sun.

Let the declivity, formerly considered as the front yard but impracticable as an approach, and which is now on the right of the angular entrance from the village, take the character of a quiet pleasure ground, in connection with the old village green of which it was originally a part.

Let the old range of brick buildings be regarded as the West side of a quadrangle. East of them there is a plateau and beyond it a moderate slope to the railway. The old backyard—which has gradually taken more of the character of the college campus—might be extended in this direction toward the railway till it should be made nearly twice its present size. There would then be sites for three times as many buildings ranged around it, as there are in the whole of your present collection. Each building so placed might have a double frontage outwardly upon a public street, the other way toward a common centre.

The principal entrance to the whole series instead of being as now in a corner and striking in diagonally between buildings from the rear of the village, should be at the middle of the East side of the Campus, which should here abut upon a broad mall and avenue laid out parallel to the railway, and intersecting the new Main East & West Street of the village beyond the station and near the new Congregational Church.

If this suggestion should be approved, clearly the proposed college church should be placed near the centre of the quadrangle, facing the Eastern entrance. Its position would then [be] on the brow of the hill, the trees now [373] growing there would group gracefully about it and it would stand in imposing, appropriate and beautiful relation to all the neighboring buildings and the surrounding landscapes.