Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/286

 248 A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO appointments on the faculty, several of them reaching the rank of professor. The total number of University students the first quarter was five hundred and ninety-four excluding duplications. There were one hundred and eighty-two in the Divinity School, one hundred and sixty-six in the Graduate Schools, and two hundred and seventy-six in the undergraduate departments. In the Academy at Morgan Park there were ninety-nine boys and girls. Thus began the work of the University of Chicago, having perhaps greater resources, a more numerous faculty, and a greater body of students than any similar institution ever began with before. Everything was new and everything was incomplete. The site had received much attention from Daniel L. Shorey, one of the Trustees, but in large part was still in its natural state. The western side was flat, but dry and covered with young oaks. The southeast quarter was like it. But these two sides were separated by low ground which was a morass in the spring, being lowest just east of where Haskell later stood, and here there was standing water for much of the year. There were a few board walks, but only a few. There was no gymnasium for Mr. Stagg's athletes, and no building for what was already a great library. Fortunately the departmental libraries in connection with the group of lecture rooms of each department compensated in some measure for the lack of a general library. A gymnasium and library building, temporary in construction, was under way and became available at the end of the first quarter. This building, poor and unsightly as it was, was an invaluable addition to the facilities of the institution. Half a dozen other buildings, the Kent Chemical Laboratory, the Walker Museum, Foster, Kelly, Beecher, and Snell dormitories, were being constructed and the campus was covered with piles of earth, and with brick, stone, iron, lumber, every kind of building material, and swarming with workmen as well as with young men and women going to and from their recitations. The professors made their way about as well as they could, dodging teams, avoiding derricks, but rejoicing in the promise of increased facilities. They needed these badly. The scientific departments had none whatever on the campus. A four-story brick building on the southwest corner of Fifty-fifth