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When he had about completed his program at Bloomington, there came to visit him an elderly Californian, Senator Leland Stanford, and his wife, Mrs. Jane Lathrop Stanford. Once Governor of California, Senator Stanford was a rich, celebrated horse breeder. To Dr. Jordan he explained his mission: his only son, Leland Stanford Jr. had died of Roman fever in 1884, aged 16, in Florence, Italy. To perpetuate his memory Senator & Mrs. Stanford had founded a university "free from traditions and precedents, one that will fit men and women for lives of service." The great Stanford horse farm in the wooded hills of Palo Alto, 30 miles "down the peninsula" (southeast) from San Francisco, was to be its site and all the Senator's wealth—some $30.000,000—would go to endow it. Because he wished it to be open to all, with tuition free, the Senator said: "The children of California shall be my children." He asked Dr. Jordan to help him build Leland Stanford Jr. University and be its first president.
"The Farm" was California's first derisive term for the new institution. Present day students still use the term with affection. In 1891 the 8,800-acre Farm was ready to receive its students and 465 of them—the famed Pioneer Class—came from up & down the Pacific Coast. There were difficulties at first: Senator Stanford died in 1893 and while his estate was tied up the Stanford faculty went unpaid until Mrs. Stanford managed to persuade a court to put the professors on her payroll as personal servants. In 1906 came the earthquake which destroyed all but the smallest and lowest of the buildings. But Stanford's rise was phenomenal, unequalled by any U. S. institution until Duke University was chartered in 1924 (TIME, April 27).
Jordan's Men. In the early days at Stanford, pioneering Dr. Jordan said: "The problem of life is not to make life easier but to make men stronger." One of his first students at Stanford in 1891 was lean, shy young "Bert" Hoover, just down from Oregon. Next year came 6-ft.-4-in., 17-year-old "Rex" Wilbur of Riverside, Calif.— The friendship begun at college between these two—like the friendship between Co-eds Lou Henry and Marguerite Blake whom they later married —was to live long. Dr. Jordan was to be specially conscious of Bert Hoover who ran a laundry agency and engineered undergraduate elections.
"I have learned that it pays to look up a man's good points," Dr. Jordan has said. It was he who found Hoover the job that enabled him to go to college; he who, though Hoover lacked entrance credits in English Composition, admitted him to Stanford. After four years Bert Hoover, famed today as an infinitive-splitter, was still deficient in English, but "as he seemed to have all the other requirements of a useful citizen, we graduated him anyway and let him take his chances in the world."
In 1907 Dr. Jordan again met Herbert Hoover, a quiet, boyish engineer of 33. ''Hoover explained that he had run through his profession. It held nothing more for him except to lay up money, of which he already had all he needed. ... He intended ... to ... find some form of executive work in which he could be of service."