The Story of Wellesley | Page 5

own inspiration. If we sift our miracles with as much
discrimination as he sifted his, we shall be doing well. We shall
discover, among other things, that in addition to the composite
influence which these colleges all together exert, each one also brings
to bear upon our educational problems her individual experience and
ideals. Wellesley, for example, with her women-presidents, and the
heads of her departments all women but three,--the professors of Music,
Education, and French,--has her peculiar testimony to offer concerning
the administrative and executive powers of women as educators, their
capacity for initiative and organization.
This is why a general history of the movement for the higher education
of women, although of value, cannot tell us all we need to know, since
of necessity it approaches the subject from the outside. The women's
colleges must speak as individuals; each one must tell her own story,
and tell it soon. The bright, experimental days are definitely

past--except in the sense in which all education, alike for men and
women, is perennially an experiment--and if the romance of those days
is to quicken the imaginations of college girls one hundred, two
hundred, five hundred years hence, the women who were the
experiment and who lived the romance must write it down.
For Wellesley in particular this consciousness of standing at the
threshold of a new epoch is especially poignant. Inevitably those forty
years before the fire of 1914 will go down in her history as a period
apart. Already for her freshmen the old college hall is a mythical
labyrinth of memory and custom to which they have no clue. New
happiness will come to the hill above the lake, new beauty will crown it,
new memories will hallow it, but--they will all be new. And if the
coming generations of students are to realize that the new Wellesley is
what she is because her ideals, though purged as by fire, are still the old
ideals; if they are to understand the continuity of Wellesley's tradition,
we who have come through the fire must tell them the story.
II.
On Wednesday, November 25, 1914, the workmen who were digging
among the fire-scarred ruins at the extreme northeast corner of old
College Hall unearthed a buried treasure. To the ordinary treasure
seeker it would have been a thing of little worth,--a rough bowlder of
irregular shape and commonplace proportions,--but Wellesley eyes saw
the symbol. It was the first stone laid in the foundations of Wellesley
College. There was no ceremony when it was laid, and there were no
guests. Mr. and Mrs. Henry Fowle Durant came up the hill on a
summer morning--Friday, August 18, 1871, was the day--and with the
help of the workmen set the stone in place.
A month later, on the afternoon of Thursday, September 14, I871, the
corner stone was laid, by Mrs. Durant, at the northwest corner of the
building, under the dining-room wing; it is significant that from the
foundations up through the growth and expansion of all the years,
women have had a hand in the making of Wellesley. In September, as
in August, there were no guests invited, but at the laying of the corner
stone there was a simple ceremony; each workman was given a Bible,

by Mr. Durant, and a Bible was placed in the corner stone. On
December 18, 1914, this stone was uncovered, and the Bible was found
in a tin box in a hollow of the stone. As most of the members of the
college had scattered for the Christmas vacation, only a little group of
people gathered about the place where, forty-three years before, Mrs.
Durant had laid the stone. Mrs. Durant was too ill to be present, but her
cousin, Miss Fannie Massie, lifted the tin box out of its hollow and
handed it to President Pendleton who opened the Bible and read aloud
the inscription:
"This building is humbly dedicated to our Heavenly Father with the
hope and prayer that He may always be first in everything in this
institution; that His word may be faithfully taught here; and that He
will use it as a means of leading precious souls to the Lord Jesus
Christ."
There followed, also in Mrs. Durant's handwriting, two passages from
the Scriptures: II Chronicles, 29: 11-16, and the phrase from the one
hundred twenty-seventh Psalm: "Except the Lord build the house they
labor in vain that build it."
This stone is now the corner stone of the new building which rises on
College Hill, and another, the keystone of the arch above the north door
of old College Hall, will be set above the doorway of the new
administration building, where its deep-graven I.H.S. will daily remind
those who pass beneath it of Wellesley's unbroken tradition of Christian
scholarship and