Palo Alto, CA Photo - Stanford University, Palo Alto, California

On October 1, 1891, Stanford University opened its doors after six years of planning and building. The prediction of a New York newspaper that Stanford professors would "lecture in marble halls to empty benches" was quickly disproved. The first student body consisted of 555 men and women, and the original faculty of 15 was expanded to 49 for the second year. The universityÃâ ‚ ¬Ã¢ „s first president was David Starr Jordan, a graduate of Cornell, who left his post as president of Indiana University to join the adventure out West. The Stanfords engaged Frederick Law Olmsted, the famed landscape architect who created New YorkÃâ ‚ ¬Ã¢ „s Central Park, to design the physical plan for the university. The collaboration was contentious, but finally resulted in an organization of quadrangles on an east-west axis. Today, as Stanford continues to expand, the universityÃâ ‚ ¬Ã¢ „s architects attempt to respect those original university plans.

Carol M. Highsmith (born 1946) is a photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed all 50 of the United States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico for 30 years. She specializes in documenting architecture, ranging from the monumental to the everyday and whimsical. Highsmith is donating her life ’s work of more than 100,000 images, copyright-free, to the Library of Congress, which established a rare one-person archive. Out of 14 million images, the Carol M. Highsmith collection is featured in the top six alongside of Mathew Brady and Dorethea Lange. Credit line: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Credit line: The Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.