We can trace that expansion from year to year through this first administration. In 1877 the Board of Visitors was established, and eminent educators and clergymen were invited to visit the college at stated intervals and stimulate by their criticism the college routine. In 1878 the Students' Aid Society was founded to help the many young women who were in need of a college training, but who could not afford to pay their own way. Through the wise generosity of Mrs. Durant and a group of Boston women, the society was set upon its feet, and its long career of blessed usefulness was begun. This is only one of the many gifts which Wellesley owes to Mrs. Durant. As Professor Katharine Lee Bates has said in her charming sketch of Mrs. Durant in the Wellesley Legenda for 1894: "Her specific gifts to Wellesley it is impossible to completely enumerate. She has forgotten, and no one else ever knew. So long as Mr. Durant was living, husband and wife were one and inseparable in service and donation. But since his death, while it has been obvious that she spends herself unsparingly in college cares, adding many of his functions to her own, a continuous flow of benefits, almost unperceived, has come to Wellesley from her open hand." As long as her health permitted, she lavished "her very life in labor of hand and brain for Wellesley, even as her husband lavished his."
In 1878 the Teachers' Registry was also established, a method of registration by which those students who expected to teach might bring their names and qualifications before the schools of the country. But the most important academic events of this year, and those which reacted directly upon the intellectual life of the college, were the establishment of the Physics laboratory, under the careful supervision of Professor Whiting, and the endowment of the Library by Professor Eben N. Horsford of Cambridge. This endowment provided a fund for the purchase of new books and for various expenses of maintenance, and was only one of the many gifts which Wellesley was to receive from this generous benefactor. Another gift, of this year, was the pipe organ, presented by Mr. William H. Groves, for the College Hall Chapel. Later, when the new Memorial Chapel was built, this organ was removed to Billings Hall, the concert room of the Department of Music.
On June 24, 1879, Wellesley held her first Commencement exercises, with a graduating class of eighteen and an address by the Reverend Richard S. Storrs, D.D., on the "Influence of Woman in the Future."
In 1880, on May 27, the corner stone of Stone Hall was laid, the second building on the college campus. It was the gift of Mrs. Valeria G. Stone, and was intended, in the beginning, as a dormitory for the "teacher specials." Doctor William A. Willcox of Malden, a devoted trustee of Wellesley from 1878 to 1904, and a relative of Mrs. Stone, was influential in securing this gift for the college, and it was he who first turned the attention of Mr. and Mrs. Durant to the needs of the women who had already been engaged in teaching, but who wished to fit themselves for higher positions by advanced work in one or more particular directions. At first, there were a good many of them, and even as late as 1889 and 1890 there were a few still in evidence; but gradually, as the number of regular students increased, and accommodations became more limited, and as opportunities for college training multiplied, these "T. Specs." as they were irreverently dubbed by the undergraduates, disappeared, and Stone Hall has for many years been filled with students in regular standing.
On June 10, 1880, the corner stone of Music Hall was laid; the inscription in the stone reads: "The College of Music is dedicated to Almighty God with the hope that it will be used in his service." There are added the following passages from the Bible:
"Trust ye in the Lord forever: for in the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength." Isaiah, 26: 4.
"Sing praises to God, sing praises:
Sing praises unto our King, sing praises.
For God is the King of all the earth." Psalms, 47: 6-7.
The building was given by the founders.
The year 1881 is marked by the closing, in June, of Wellesley's preparatory department, another intellectual advance. In June also, on the tenth, the corner stone of Simpson Cottage was laid. The building was the gift of Mr. Michael Simpson, and has been used since 1908 as the college hospital. In the autumn of 1881, Stone Hall and Waban Cottage—the latter another gift from the founders were opened for students.
On October 3, 1881, Mr. Durant died, and shortly afterwards Miss Howard resigned. After leaving Wellesley, she lived in Methuen, Massachusetts, and in Brooklyn, New York, where she died, March 3, 1907. Mrs. Marion Pelton Guild, of the class of '80, says of Miss Howard, in an article on Wellesley written for the New England Magazine, October, 1914, that "she was in the difficult position of the nominal captain, who is in fact only a lieutenant. Yet she held it with a true self-respect, honoring the fiery genius of her leader, if she could not always follow its more startling fights; and not hesitating to withstand him in his most positive plans, if her long practical experience suggested that it was necessary." From Mt. Holyoke, her Alma Mater, Miss Howard received, in the latter part of her life, the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters.