In this administration also the financial methods of the college were revised. Mrs. Irvine, we are reminded by Florence S. Marcy Crofut, of the class of 1897, "established a system of management and purchasing into which all the halls of residence were brought, and this remains almost without change to the present day." On March 27, 1895, Mrs. Durant resigned the treasurership of the college, which she had held since her husband's death, and upon her nomination, Mr. Alpheus H. Hardy was elected to the office. In 1896, the trustees issued a report in which they informed the friends of Wellesley that although Mr. Durant, in his will, had made the college his residuary legatee, subject to a life tenancy, the personal estate had suffered such depreciation and loss "as to render this prospective endowment of too slight consequence to be reckoned on in any plans for the development and maintenance of the college." At this time, Wellesley was in debt to the amount of $103,048.14. During the next nineteen years, trustees and alumnae were to labor incessantly to pay the expenses of the college and to secure an endowment fund. What Wellesley owes to the unstinted devotion of Mr. Hardy during these lean years can never be adequately expressed.
The buildings erected during Mrs. Irvine's tenure of office were few. Fiske Cottage was opened in September, 1894, for the use of students who wished to work their way through college. The "cottage" had been originally the village grammar school, but when Mr. Hunnewell gave a new schoolhouse to the village, the college was able, through the generosity of Mrs. Joseph M. Fiske, Mr. William S. Houghton, Mr. Elisha S. Converse, and a few other friends, to move the old schoolhouse to the campus and remodel it as a dormitory. In February, 1894, a chemical laboratory was built under Norumbega hill,—an ugly wooden building, a distress to all who care for Wellesley's beauty, and an unmistakable witness to her poverty.
On November 22, 1897, the corner stone of the Houghton Memorial Chapel was laid, a building destined to be one of the most satisfactory and beautiful on the campus. It was given by Miss Elizabeth G. Houghton and Mr. Clement S. Houghton of Cambridge as a memorial of their father, Mr. William S. Houghton, for many years a trustee of the college.
In 1898 Mrs. John C. Whitin, a trustee, gave to the college an astronomical observatory and telescope. The building was completed in 1900. Another gift of 1898, fifty thousand dollars, came from the estate of the late Charles T. Wilder, and was used to build Wilder Hall, the fourth dormitory in the group on Norumbega hill. In 1898, the first of the Society houses, the Shakespeare House, was opened.
On November 4, 1897, Mrs. Irvine presented before the Board of Trustees a review of the history of the college under the new curriculum, and a statement of urgent needs which had arisen. She closed with a recommendation that her term of office should end in June, 1898, as she believed that the necessities which had led to her appointment no longer existed, and she recognized that new demands pressed, which she was not fitted to meet. As Mrs. Irvine had stated verbally, both to the Board of Trustees and to a committee appointed by them to consider her recommendation, that she would not serve under a permanent appointment, the committee "was limited to the consideration of the time at which that recommendation should become operative." They asked the president to change her time of withdrawal to June, 1899, and she consented to do this, with the provision that she was to be released from her duties before the end of the year, if her successor were ready to assume the duties of the office before June, 1899.
After her retirement from Wellesley, Mrs. Irvine made her home in the south of France, but she returned to America in 1912 to be present at the inauguration of President Pendleton. And in the year 1913-1914, after the death of Madame Colin, she performed a signal service for the college in temporarily assuming the direction of the Department of French. Through her good offices, the department was reorganized, but the New England winter had proved too severe for her after her long sojourn in a milder climate, and in 1914, Mrs. Irvine returned again to her home in Southern France, bearing with her the love and gratitude of Wellesley for her years of efficient and unselfish service. During the war of 1914-1915, she had charge of the linen room in the military hospital at Aix-les-Bains.
V.
On March 8, 1899, the trustees announced their election of Wellesley's fifth president, Caroline Hazard. In June, Mrs. Irvine retired, and the new administration dates from July 1, 1899.
Unlike her predecessors, Miss Hazard brought to her office no technical academic training, and no experience as a teacher. Born at Peacedale, Rhode Island, June 10, 1856, the daughter of Rowland and Margaret (Rood) Hazard, and the descendant of Thomas Hazard, the founder of Rhode Island, she had been educated by tutors and in a private school in Providence, and later had carried on her studies abroad. Before coming to Wellesley, she had already won her own place in the annals of Rhode Island, as editor, by her edition of the philosophical and economic writings of her grandfather, Rowland G. Hazard, the wealthy woolen manufacturer of Peacedale, as author, through a study of life in Narragansett in the eighteenth century, entitled "Thomas Hazard, Son of Robert, called College Tom", and as poet, in a volume of Narragansett ballads and a number of religious sonnets, followed during her Wellesley years by "A Scallop Shell of Quiet", verses of delicate charm and dignity.
Mrs. Guild has said that Miss Hazard came, "bringing the ease and breadth of the cultivated woman of the world, who is yet an idealist and a Christian, into an atmosphere perhaps too strictly scholastic." But she also brought unusual executive ability and training in administrative affairs, both academic and commercial, for her father, aside from his manufacturing interests, was a member of the corporation of Brown University. Hers is the type of intelligence and power seen often in England, where women of her social position have an interest in large issues and an instinct for affairs, which American women of the same class have not evinced in any arresting degree.