Seattle: 1900-1920 -From Boomtown, Through Urban Turbulence ...

Courtesy, Museum of History and IndustryEducation63The 1902 addition of the lessadorned Science Hall on theleft to the original and moreornate Administration Building(Denny Hall) on the right wasa compromise between theUniversity of Washington’s needfor more classrooms and the statelegislature’s reluctance to supportthe institution, although the studentbody had tripled since the school’s1895 encampment north of PortageBay. Science Hall was renamedParrington Hall after the PulitzerPrize winning English professorVernon Parrington’s death in 1929.In 1895 the University of Washington moved from its original ten-acre tract indowntown Seattle to the shore of Lake Washington at Union Bay, the periphery of the city,where the grounds were covered by virgin timber. Franklin P. Graves became the university’spresident in 1898; he aimed to upgrade the university’s curriculum to accreditable standardsand he began recruiting faculty with doctoral degrees. One doctorate whom Graves hadinherited, J. Allen Smith, soon attracted national attention for his revisionist interpretationof the U.S. Constitution and his publications on municipal government. He was oftenembroiled in controversy because of his leadership of the city’s municipal ownership forcesand his support of worker unionization.Graves added three more professors with doctoral degrees to the faculty: HoraceByers (chemistry), Thomas F. Kane (Latin), and Frederick M. Padelford (English). Heestablished five schools—liberal arts, mines, law, engineering, and pharmacy—as well asa graduate school. Graves added four new buildings: two dormitories, a science building,and a powerhouse. He resigned under pressure from the regents in 1902, but not beforetripling the size of the student body from 200 to 600. Still, the university was not integratedwith the city.Thomas Kane replaced Graves after briefly serving as acting president. During hisshort tenure on the faculty, Kane had recognized the importance of the marine environmentto the area. So when he established a marine biology laboratory in 1904 at Friday Harbor onSan Juan Island, he moved the university closer to integration with the wider community.He took another step in this direction—a step that endeared him to the legislature—when heestablished a timber testing station. The station paved the way for the legislature’s approvalof a school of forestry and a domestic science program.The legislature usually resisted requests for construction funds. Luckily, theuniversity was able to acquire twenty-three of the vacant buildings that had been constructedfor the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Because of Kane’s efforts and because it hadhosted the popular exposition, the university became more fully integrated with city life.However, legislators and the downtown establishment could easily be unsettledby any kind of political activism on campus, whether it be instigated by the faculty orstudents. Tensions at the university first arose in late 1909 when the regents endorsed arequest by the Seattle Electric Company to build a trestle for its cars across the campus. A