CHAPTER IV
BUILDING OF THE TERRITORIAL UNIVERSITY.
Early in 1861, the University Commissioners, Rev. D. Bagley, John Webster and Edmund Carr, selected the site for the proposed building, ten acres in Seattle, described as a “beautiful eminence overlooking Elliott Bay and Puget Sound.” A. A. Denny donated eight and a fraction acres, Terry and Lander, one and a fraction acres. The structure was fifty by eighty feet, two stories in height, beside belfry and observatory. There were four rooms above, including the grand lecture room, thirty-six by eighty feet, and six rooms below, beside the entrance hall of twelve feet, running through the whole building.
The president’s house was forty by fifty, with a solid foundation of brick and cement cellar; the boarding house twenty-four by forty-eight, intended to have an extension when needed. A supply was provided of the purest spring water, running through one thousand four hundred feet of charred pump logs.
Buildings of such dimensions were not common in the Northwest in those days; materials were expensive and money was scarce.
It was chiefly through the efforts of John Denny that a large appropriation of land was made by Congress for the benefit of the new-born institution. Although advanced in years, his hair as white as snow, he made the long journey to Washington city and return when months were required to accomplish it.
By the sale of these lands the expense of construction and purchase of material were met. The land was then worth but one dollar and a half per acre, but enough was sold to amount to $30,400.69.
At that time the site lay in the midst of a heavy forest, through which a trail was made in order to reach it.
Of the ten-acre campus, seven acres were cleared of the tall fir and cedar trees at an expense of two hundred and seventy-five dollars per acre, the remaining three were worse, at three hundred and sixteen dollars per acre.
The method of removing these forest giants was unique and imposing. The workers partially grubbed perhaps twenty trees standing near each other, then dispatched a sailor aloft in their airy tops to hitch them together with a cable and descend to terra firma. A king among the trees was chosen whose downfall should destroy his companions, and relentlessly uprooting it, the tree-fallers suddenly and breathlessly withdrew to witness a grand sight, the whole group of unnumbered centuries’ growth go crashing down at once. They would scarcely have been human had they uttered no shout of triumph at such a spectacle. To see but one great, towering fir tree go grandly to the earth with rush of boughs and thunderous sound is a thrilling, pathetic and awe-inspiring sight.
About the center of the tract was left a tall cedar tree to which was added a topmast. The tree, shorn of its limbs and peeled clean of bark, was used for a flagstaff.