The bronze visage of John Harvard, long the presiding spirit in the leafy, weathered-brick Harvard Yard, stares out over a vast and flourishing arena that today ranks as one of the world's most distinguished centers of learning. Three and a half centuries ago, however, it was only a farmhouse surrounded by a one-acre cow pasture. For that matter, the original John Harvard was not the founder or even the head of Harvard College; his only contribution was a bequest of 400 books and half his estate, which amounted to no more than (pounds)779 and may have been only (pounds)375. Nor was Harvard actually founded 350 years ago. All that happened in 1636 was that the Great and General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony authorized the expenditure of (pounds)400 "towards a schoale or colledge."
More than a year passed before the "schoale" 's appointed overseers bought the farmhouse, surrounded it with a six-foot fence, planted 30 apple trees and turned over the whole establishment to its first master and sole teacher, Nathaniel Eaton. A poor choice. Though Eaton was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, he had a vile temper, and his frugal wife apparently served the twelve students mackerel "with all their guts in them" and hasty pudding spiced with goat droppings. When Eaton finally attacked an assistant with a walnut club "big enough to have killed a horse," he was hauled into court, fined and fired. Harvard was shut down for a year.
Despite these inauspicious beginnings, the little school that Cotton Mather called a "college of divines" slowly grew. William Stoughton, '50, who grimly sentenced 20 people to death for witchcraft, was the first alumnus to donate a building. (By contrast, the Rev. George Burroughs, '70, duly became the only Harvard man to be hanged for consorting with Satan.)
During the Revolutionary War, Harvard was taken over by 1,500 of Washington's troops as a barracks. When the students returned from temporary exile in Concord, they found that all the brass doorknobs were missing, and much of the lead roof had been melted down for bullets. Harvard subsequently granted Washington its first honorary doctorate in 1776, and the President later transferred his step-grandson there from Princeton on the theory that Harvard, still largely a school for clerics, was "less prone to dissipation and debauchery."
After two full centuries of increasing growth, secularism and financial independence, Harvard remained a small and inadequate school. Its faculty in 1868 numbered scarcely 20, its student body fewer than 500. Its dormitories had no central heat or running water. Its narrow curriculum of required courses involved largely the recitation of memorized texts, many of them in Latin. "No one took Harvard College seriously," said Henry Adams, '58. "It taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile."