Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/357

 THE SECOND ERA OF BUILDING 313 The work of Mr. Yerkes for the Observatory which bore his name was crowned by a bequest for its benefit of one hundred thousand dollars. In 1897-98 the attendance of women students had increased from less than two hundred in 1893 to rnore than a thousand. There had come to be a most insistent call for additional residence halls to receive these growing numbers. It was under these cir- cumstances that Mrs. Elizabeth G. Kelly, who had already given fifty thousand dollars for a women's hall, once more brought the needed help. On May 17, 1898, Mrs. Kelly sent to the Trustees a letter in which she said : President Harper and Mr. Goodspeed having called my attention to the great desire of the University to complete the erection of the hall for women between Kelly and Beecher halls, I hereby agree to turn over to the University, for this purpose, securities amounting to fifty thousand dollars, on the following conditions, viz., The building shall be called Green Hall, in memory of my parents. The University shall pay me five per cent per annum on the said sum of fifty thousand dollars, viz., two thousand, five hundred dollars annually during my life. The University shall place in the hall a memorial tablet bearing the names of my father and mother. At my decease the fund thus contributed is to be the property of the University of Chicago. Mrs. Kelly's reference to "the hall for women" relates to a movement among the women of the city, inaugurated during the raising of the million dollars in ninety days, to raise a fund for a building for women students from a considerable number of sub- scribers. A number of women contributed to this fund, Mrs. Martin Ryerson, Mr. Ryerson's mother, giving ten thousand dollars, and the foundations of the building were put in between Beecher and Kelly when those halls were built. It was to complete this building, begun six years earlier, that Mrs. Kelly's second contribution was made. The plans for the three halls required that the central section, which was the one to be finished, should be five stories in height, Beecher and Kelly each being four. It also exceeded them in length. Its total cost, including the foundations, laid six years earlier, was seventy-two thousand dollars, and Mrs. Kelly in the end very generously provided this entire sum. Green Hall provided a home for sixty-seven women. It was opened to students on January i, 1899.