| Leland Stanford devoted to the university the fortune he had amassed, first by supplying provisions to the \’49ers mining for California gold and later as one of the \»Big Four,\» whose Central Pacific Railroad laid tracks eastward to meet the Union Pacific and complete the transcontinental railway. Included in the grant to the new university was the Stanfords\’ more than 8,000-acre Palo Alto Stock Farm for the breeding and training of trotting horses and thoroughbred stock, 35 miles south of the family\’s San Francisco residence. The campus still carries the nickname \»the Farm.\» Under the direction of Frederick Law Olmsted, the famed landscape architect who created New York\’s Central Park, and Charles Allerton Coolidge, a 28-year-old who designed the buildings, the farm\’s open fields became the site of arcades and quadrangles. In a 1913 letter, Stanford\’s first president, David Starr Jordan, wrote: \»The yellow sandstone arches and cloisters, the \»red-tiled roofs against the azure sky,\» make a picture that can never be forgotten, itself an integral part of a Stanford education.\»
On the university\’s opening day, Jordan said to Stanford\’s pioneer class: \»It is for us as teachers and students in the university\’s first year to lay the foundations of a school which may last as long as human civilization. … It is hallowed by no traditions; it is hampered by none. Its finger posts all point forward.\»
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