Gallery Guide | The Melancholy Museum

A GALLERY GUIDE
to THE
MELANCHOLY
MUSEUM
LOVE, DEATH, AND MOURNING AT STANFORD
A MARK DION PROJECT
Edited by SUSAN DACKERMAN and PAULA FINDLEN
With contributions by Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Mikaela Berkeley,
Julie Cain, Jack Carney, Susan Dackerman, Paula Findlen,
Christina J. Hodge, Laura Jones, Juliana Nalerio, Alexander Nemerov,
Liv Porte, María Gloria Robalino, Astrid Johannah Smith, Taylor Spann,
Murphy Temple, Mitch Therieau, Anna Toledano, Mahpiya Vanderbilt,
Alexander Veitch, Megan Rhodes Victor, Richard White, and Meagan Wu
CANTOR ARTS CENTER, STANFORD UNIVERSITY
CALIFORNIA, 2019

THE MELANCHOLY MUSEUM
3 The Melancholy Museum: A Mark Dion Project
6 First Inhabitants: The Ohlone of the Peninsula
8 Timeline of the Stanfords and Their Museum
15 Melancholy Museum Objects
Ohlone Mortar and Pestle; Shovel and Detonator; The Last Spike;
Horse Hoof Inkwell; E. E. Rogers, Electioneer; Renaissance Revival
Clock; Watercolor Paint Set; Leland Jr.’s Camera and Photo Album;
Roman Cattle Horns; Alabaster Fruit; I. W. Taber, Leland Jr.’s Nob
Hill Museum; Leland Jr.’s Death Mask; Porcelain Cup and Saucer;
Black Ostrich Feather Fan; Banquet Menu; Wage Receipts; Flowerpot;
Salviati Mosaic Workers; Bourbon Bottles; Jane’s Jewelry; Spirit
Photograph; Poison Bottle
26 Leland Stanford Sr. and the Central Pacific Railroad
28 Immigrant Labor on the Stanford Estate
30 The Palo Alto Stock Farm
31 Horse Relics
33 Palo Alto Spring: The Martyrdom of Time
36 The Damkeeper’s Grief
37 A Boy’s Cabinet: Origins of the Leland Stanford
Junior Museum
40 Spiritual Afterlives
43 Who Killed Jane Stanford?
45 The 1906 and 1989 Earthquakes
48 Credits and Acknowledgments
front cover: Museum, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California,
c. 1900. Cantor Arts Center
opposite: Leland Jr. Death Mask, 1884. Stanford University Archives

The Melancholy Museum:
A Mark Dion Project
SUSAN DACKERMAN
John and Jill Freidenrich Director, Cantor Arts Center
ALTHOUGH THE MUSEUM ESTABLISHED BY LELAND SR. AND JANE
Stanford in memory of their son, Leland Jr., is celebrating its 125th
anniversary this year, it has only been in active operation for a portion
of that time. In the wake of the fifteen-year-old’s tragic death, his
parents founded both Leland Stanford Junior University and the
Leland Stanford Junior Museum, the latter of which opened in 1894
and was expanded in 1900. When it was built, its grandeur and scale
were rivaled only by its East Coast contemporaries—the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the
Philadelphia Museum of Art. Twelve years into its life, however, the
1906 San Francisco earthquake catastrophically toppled the majestic
museum, and much of its collection was lost to the collapse and the
looting that followed. Because Jane Stanford, the museum’s most vocal
advocate, died in 1905, when it reopened in 1909 only a quarter of the
former building was salvaged, and part of that space was given over to
classrooms, laboratories, and storage rather than display. In 1945 the
building closed for further renovations and did not reopen again until
1954. During this time a much-needed inventory of the art collection
was conducted, and much was determined to be lost.
During that half century of the museum’s closure and instability,
most other art museums across the nation were building their
collections and developing their educational missions. Thus, from the
1950s through the 1980s, Stanford’s museum curators and art history
faculty made up for lost time, heroically working to revitalize the
institution into a worthy center for exhibitions, research, and teaching.
But while lightning never strikes twice, earthquakes do, and in 1989
the Loma Prieta quake again critically damaged the building and its
collections. The museum’s first century of existence was steeped in
sorrow and destruction.
Gustave-Claude-Etienne Courtois (1852–1923),
Portrait of Leland Stanford Jr., 1884. Cantor Arts Center
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When the renamed Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts
reopened in 1999, with a new addition on its southwest quadrant, it
included galleries dedicated to the display of objects from the Stanford
family’s original collection. The Stanfords’ idea to found a museum
had emerged from their son’s capacious collecting and museological
inclinations. At home he collected and displayed toys, Native American
mortars and pestles, photographs, and taxidermied birds and animals,
to which he added Egyptian and Mediterranean antiquities, relics of
warfare, and other artistic and natural curiosities from his European
travels. After the boy’s death in Florence in 1884, his parents continued
to supplement his collection with objects from around the world—as
he would have done himself had he lived. Born of love and grief,
the collection kept their son’s dream of a museum, as well as his
acquisitive nature, alive.
What happens when a museum is erected to contain all that love
and sorrow? Although Leland Jr.’s death precipitated the founding
of one of the most illustrious universities in the world, which in turn
prompted the emergence of Silicon Valley and globe-changing
technological innovations, his art museum continues to be the site
of his mourning. While the proximate Stanford Mausoleum holds
the eternal remains of father, mother, and son, their ghosts inhabit
the museum. These apparitions take the form of memorial paintings,
mundane objects that Leland Jr. and his parents gathered and held in
their hands, goods of the indigenous people who originally populated
the region, mementos of the Chinese workers who labored for the
Stanfords, as well as artifacts of the family’s businesses, their Palo Alto
home, and their deaths. How can a museum present a collection that
embodies so much history and emotion?
All that grief, love, and mourning have found a new home in
The Melancholy Museum, an installation created by artist Mark Dion.
To house the objects Leland Jr. amassed, and the stuff his parents
accumulated to remember him, Dion has created a mourning cabinet.
The grand Victorian case houses the boy collector’s earthly and
otherworldly sepulchral goods as well as his parents’ heartache,
anguish, and hope. Through the past year, Dion has sorted through
the remains of the Stanfords’ lives and dreams. He has examined with
his own collector’s eye young Leland Jr.’s collection and identified
those materials that best tell his and his museum’s story. Assembled
on the cabinet’s shelves and drawers, the stuff narrates the boy’s life
and death through
images and objects
related to the four
elements—earth, air,
fire, and water—and
ether, his final resting
place. Individually
and collectively these
aggregated materials
give Leland Jr. and his
parents an afterlife
within the museum.
Dion also has
excavated other
Stanford histories,
of both family and
place. Digging through
Special Collections
Émile Munier (1840–1895), Leland Stanford Jr. and the Archaeology
as an Angel Comforting His Grieving Mother,
Center, he found
1884. Cantor Arts Center
assorted letters,
ledgers, and objects
to describe the lives and deaths of others whose lives and labor made
possible the university and the museum and its collections. These
causalities and tragedies are also represented in The Melancholy
Museum in the form of fragmented pots, tools, and bodies.
Through objects alone, Dion’s installation tells the story of how
one family’s rush West to sell hardware to prospectors resulted in the
accumulation of vast wealth and power. The furniture, photographs,
Native American objects, menus, and other artifacts of material life at
the turn of the twentieth century that comprise the artwork show how
the family upgraded its business interests to politics, the railroad, and
a horse farm, and how those interests were enabled by land previously
inhabited by the Ohlone people and the labor of Chinese and other
immigrants. Finally, the grand Victorian mourning cabinet, the heart
of Dion’s work, demonstrates how one teenage boy’s death resulted
not in the creation of the nation’s largest museum but in a museum
where love, grief, and mourning are forever entwined, The Melancholy
Museum.
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First Inhabitants:
The Ohlone of the Peninsula
CHRISTINA J. HODGE
Academic Curator and Collections Manager, Archaeology Center, and
LAURA JONES
Director of Heritage Services and University Archaeologist
with contributions by
CHARLENE NJIMEH (Chair) and MONICA ARRELANO (Vice-Chair),
Muwekma Ohlone Tribe
IN THIS PLACE, ON THESE LANDS, TIME STARTS BEFORE MEMORY.
This deep and ongoing story belongs to the Ohlone people and the local
Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area, who explain
that Ohlone people have been here since time immemorial. Their tribe
represents “all the known surviving lineages aboriginal to the San
Francisco Bay region who trace their ancestry through the Missions
Dolores, Mission Santa Clara, and Mission San Jose; and who were
also members of the historic Federally Recognized Verona Band of
Alameda County.” Ohlone ancestral, un-ceded territories comprise
much of the lands surrounding the San Francisco Bay, including those
of Stanford University.
With this declaration, the tribe members constitute themselves
through place and family. These twin anchors held fast through
colonial violence and systematic attempts at eradication that began in
the late eighteenth century. With the tribe’s help, Stanford University
has grown in understanding this history and its own accountability.
Today, the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe has become one of the institution’s
most important partners.
In the deep past, indigenous Bay Area communities lived in dozens of
distinct villages across a productive landscape, which they understood and
managed. Each group had recognized homelands, but each village was
also multicultural, as young people were required to marry partners from
outside their home villages. Over thousands of years, ancestral Ohlone left
tangible signs across their homelands through artifacts, buried features,
and changes to the land itself. Stanford University cares for many such
sites. Alongside tribal knowledge, archaeological evidence contradicts the
notion that European and US occupiers found a western “wilderness.”
They entered a dynamic world susceptible to violent disruption.
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In 1769, Spain claimed California lands by sending Catholic missionaries
and invading armies, inaugurating a catastrophic era of compulsory labor,
disease and deprivation, and the imposition of Christianity. The Ohlone
were among those forced to labor for Crown and Church in missions,
in presidios, and on Ohlone lands seized and granted by the Crown to
its faithful soldiers. The Ohlone people maintained a forceful resistance
against Spanish occupation for decades. Even as their situation grew more
perilous under Mexican and US rule in the nineteenth century, leading
them to eventually hide their Indian identity, language, and customs, they
survived, returning to ancestral lands and forming new communities. The
largest of these was in Pleasanton in the East Bay hills, where hundreds of
Ohlone and their relatives from neighboring tribes gathered at the Alisal
Rancheria and made a valiant attempt to regain their independence at the
turn of the century. But their land claims were not respected. They were
evicted and the village was burned to the ground.
The Muwekma Ohlone still struggle today with the consequences
of US colonial policies that ignored their land claims and encouraged
assimilation. Their continuing solidarity and resilience as a community
are remarkable. The tribal government continues to advocate for their
rights with local, state, and federal government agencies. While living
fully modern lives in our Bay Area cities, Ohlone people gather and
prepare traditional foods, teach the children their traditions and the
Chochenyo language, and advocate for the preservation of sacred sites.
Stanford’s reeducation about Muwekma history began in the 1980s
with difficult conversations about the return of thousands of ancestral
human remains and funerary objects excavated by Stanford faculty
and stored in the basement of the former Leland Stanford Junior
Museum (now the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts).
Stanford repatriated the human remains and funerary objects to the
Ohlone in 1988 for reburial. This history makes the museum a powerful
place in Ohlone memory. Today, the university and tribe are strong
partners in community-led archaeology, historic interpretation, and a
Native plant garden.
Former Muwekma tribal chairwoman Rosemary Cambra stresses
her tribe’s survivance: “Our people, the Muwekmas, the East Bay
families, have never left their lands. They have always been here for
generation after generation.” Today, tribal members remain connected
to their homelands—including Stanford, which has dedicated
residential space for indigenous students known as Muwekma-Tah-
Ruk—The House of the People.
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Timeline of the Stanfords
and Their Museum
1824 Leland Stanford Sr. is born on
March 9 outside of Troy, New York.
1828 Jane Eliza Lathrop is born in
Albany, New York, on August 25.
1848 Leland Sr. passes the
New York bar exam and opens
a law office in Port Washington,
Wisconsin.
1850 Leland Sr. returns to Albany to
marry Jane on September 30.
1852 After fire destroys his law
office, Leland Sr. travels to California
to join his brothers’ mercantile
business in El Dorado County in
gold country. Jane stays in New York
to tend to her dying father.
1853–55 With his brothers’ financial
support, Leland Sr. operates a
mercantile store with partner Nick
Smith, while his brothers open a
mercantile in Sacramento.
1855 Leland Sr. brings Jane out to
California and buys the Sacramento
mercantile.
1856 Leland Sr. helps found the
California chapter of the Republican
Party.
1861 The Big Four—the others are
Collis Potter Huntington, Mark
Hopkins, and Charles Crocker—
form a committee, with Leland Sr.
LIV PORTE
Curatorial Assistant, Cantor Arts Center
as president, to build the Central
Pacific Railroad eastward from
Sacramento.
Leland Sr. is elected governor of
California.
1863 Leland Sr. breaks ground on
the new railroad. The “Governor
Stanford” locomotive is built
in Philadelphia and Lancaster,
Pennsylvania, and shipped around
Cape Horn to San Francisco.
It makes its first run in November.
1865–68 Leland Sr. hires several
thousand Chinese men to help
build the transcontinental railroad.
An additional group of Chinese
laborers will work at the family’s
private residences in San Francisco,
Sacramento, Palo Alto, and
Washington, DC, until his death in
1893.
1867 After a farewell tea party, Jane
begins several months of secluded
rest, per doctor’s orders, to prepare
for childbirth.
1868 Leland DeWitt Stanford Jr.
is born on May 14. His parents
allegedly announce his arrival at
a dinner party by presenting him
nestled in a bed of blossoms on a
silver platter.
1869 The driving of the Golden
Spike on May 10 commemorates the
completion of the transcontinental
railroad.
Leland Sr. purchases his first racing
trotter, Occident.
1872 Leland Sr. meets the
naturalist Louis Agassiz in
Sacramento in October. Agassiz
encourages the founding of
institutions of learning on the West
Coast, including museums of natural
history and art.
Leland Sr. commissions famed
photographer Eadweard Muybridge
to photograph his horses in motion.
1874 After nineteen years in
Sacramento, the Stanford family
moves its primary residence to
San Francisco.
1876 The Stanfords move into their
Nob Hill mansion and purchase the
Palo Alto estate as a country home.
Leland Sr. purchases a second
horse, Electioneer, for $12,000,
along with twelve mares costing
an additional $29,200, planning
to breed world-record-breaking
trotters.
The Stanfords travel to the
Philadelphia Centennial Exposition,
where they display two Thomas
Hill paintings, Donner Lake and
Yosemite Valley. Hill wins a medal
for landscape painting.
1877–78 Leland Sr. commissions
Eadweard Muybridge to photograph
the completed Nob Hill mansion,
known as “millionaire’s mansion.”
1879 The Stanford family purchases
twelve hundred trees and shrubs
from an establishment in Flushing,
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New York, and transports them
to their Palo Alto estate via the
transcontinental railroad.
1880 The Stanfords take Leland
Jr. on a two-year trip to Europe.
They acquire family portraits in
Paris, sculptures in Rome, and early
modern paintings in Florence.
Chinese gardeners begin to lay out
the Palo Alto arboretum.
1881 While in Pompeii in March
1881, Jane allegedly advises Leland
Jr. to make a piece of broken Roman
mosaic glass the foundation of his
future museum.
The Stanfords purchase land near
Vina, California, planting more
than one million grapevines and
employing around three hundred
mostly Chinese laborers.
1882 The Catalogue of Leland
Stanford’s Collection of Pictures,
listing 181 paintings in the Nob Hill
mansion, is printed.
Leland Jr. dreams of making his
burgeoning collection the nucleus
of a great West Coast museum. He
arranges a room of his treasures
on the third floor of the Nob Hill
mansion.
1883 French vintners improve the
quality of Vina Ranch wine, though it
is more successful with brandy and
sweet wine than dry French wine.
1884 The Stanfords embark on
a second trip through Europe.
Leland Jr. collects everywhere they
go. In Naples he begins showing
signs of illness, later diagnosed as
typhoid fever, probably contracted in
Constantinople en route to Athens.
The Stanfords call in the best
doctors in Rome, then take him to
Florence. Leland Jr. dies in the Hotel
Bristol in Florence on March 13,
aged fifteen years and ten months.
Awaiting the completion of their
Palo Alto mausoleum, the Stanfords
travel with Leland Jr.’s body to Paris
and New York. They acquire five
thousand duplicates of Cypriote
antiquities from the Cesnola
Collection at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
The family buries their son in Palo
Alto on November 27. A public
service takes place in Grace
Cathedral in San Francisco on
November 30.
1885 On November 11, Leland Sr.
and Jane file for a grant to establish
a university in honor of their son.
Leland Sr. is elected to serve as a
US senator from California.
1886 Leland Jr.’s former tutor
Herbert Charles Nash publishes The
Leland Stanford, Jr. Museum: Origin
and Description, describing the
current state of the collection.
1887 The Stanfords contemplate
San Francisco’s Twin Peaks as the
site for their future museum, after
deciding against Golden Gate Park.
Jane sets a cornerstone marking
the edge of the future university on
May 14.
1888 Jane and Leland Sr. embark
upon their first trip to Europe
following Leland Jr.’s death, amid
rumors that Leland Sr. will become
the Republican presidential
candidate.
1890 The Stanfords finalize their
decision to build a museum on their
Palo Alto land.
The approximately two hundred
laborers at Vina Ranch, whose
numbers swell to around one
thousand at harvest, are now mostly
European immigrants or white US
Americans because of growing anti-
Chinese sentiment.
The racehorse Electioneer dies on
December 3.
Leland Sr. steps down as president
of the Central Pacific Railroad
and is elected to a second term
as senator.
1891 Jane and Leland Sr. establish
the Leland Stanford Junior Museum.
Ground is broken on February 18.
Breeder and Sportsman reports on
June 27 that Electioneer’s skeleton
is “mounted and ready to be placed
in the museum at Palo Alto.”
Occident’s skeleton has been in
Stanford’s stable since 1886. There
are now approximately 750 Stock
Farm horses.
Stanford University opens its doors
in October to five hundred students,
and hires Chinese cooks to feed
them.
Newspapers report that Jane “blazed
with diamonds” at a Washington, DC,
party.
1892 The Stanfords make their
last trip to Europe together. In an
interview, Jane declares her intent
to make their museum “the finest
art gallery that any school or college
possesses.”
1893 Leland Sr. dies on June 21
and is buried on June 25. Jane
burns their correspondence and
becomes the Stanford estate’s sole
trustee. She transfers works of
art from San Francisco to Palo Alto
in August.
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Timothy Hopkins, son of Mark
Hopkins, and his wife, May, give
the museum Reverend Henry G.
Appenzeller’s collection of Korean
artifacts.
Jane bequeaths the Stanford
family mansion in Sacramento to
the Roman Catholic Church as a
home for orphaned children. The
family home in Albany becomes
the Lathrop Memorial, a home for
orphans supervised by the Albany
Orphan Society.
Jane approves Maurizio Camerino’s
designs for mosaic panels of
History and Ancient Art, but finds
the Salviati & Co. director’s image
of Modern Art better suited to “a
botanical collection, but not for an
Art Museum,” preferring instead an
image of ancient Abyssinia.
Jane purchases Henry Chapman
Ford’s twenty-four watercolors of the
California missions. They become
part of the museum’s collection
related to the missions and early
California history.
Jane announces to the board of
trustees on February 11 that she has
deeded her San Francisco home to
the university.
1899 The first shipment of art and
antiquities from the Stanfords’
Washington, DC, mansion arrives
on July 3, along with David Starr
Jordan’s gift of seal furs and a
stuffed panther.
Jane purchases John Daggett’s
collection of Native American curios,
especially baskets from the Yurok,
Karok, and Hupa tribes near the
Klamath River, which have been on
loan to the museum since 1893.
Jane travels to Europe in the
summer and fall.
1900 Two new brick wings of the
museum are completed, making
it one of the largest in the world
at three hundred thousand square
feet. Jane’s elaborate directions
regarding how the inscription on
the facade should commemorate
her son are ignored. Harry Peterson
becomes the first director, holding
this position until 1917.
1900–1901 Jane travels to Europe
and Egypt and collects antiquities
for the museum.
1903 The Palo Alto Stock Farm
closes and the horses are sold.
Assistant curator E. A. Austin ’05
collects minerals above Sutter Creek
to build the museum’s mineralogical
collection.
Salviati & Co. donates two hundred
pieces of Venetian glass, followed by
a gift of an additional eighty items
in 1904, for the museum’s Venetian
Room.
1894 The Leland Stanford Junior
Museum opens its doors in the fall.
John Milton Oskison, a young Anglo-
Cherokee student, recalls being told
around this time that the museum
possessed a replica of Leland Jr.’s
last breakfast.
1897 Jane fails to sell her jewels
in London during Queen Victoria’s
Diamond Jubilee, but is still
determined to sacrifice them to
support the university. She has them
photographed and painted in oils.
After admitting San Mateo
teachers to the museum gratis and
expressing willingness to extend the
same courtesy to “all invitees and
distinguished visitors,” Jane denies
David Starr Jordan’s proposal to
admit all visitors free, claiming that
“there would be no discipline, order,
or restriction after a few years of
such freedom.”
Jane’s brother, Henry Lathrop, dies
on April 3. Jane commissions a
sculpture in his honor, The Angel of
Grief, and has it placed next to the
family mausoleum.
1902 Jane travels to Hawaii, Japan,
and other parts of Asia to collect
Asian artifacts. By then Hill’s Donner
Lake and Yosemite Valley are on
display. She considers the museum
“necessary and appropriate to a
university of high degree.”
Jane hands over control of university
affairs to the board of trustees.
En route to Japan and other parts
of Asia she visits her brother-inlaw
Thomas Welton Stanford in
Australia.
1904 Jane attends the St. Louis
Exposition and purchases the Ikeda
collection of Japanese and Chinese
art. She justifies the cost of the
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museum expansion, reminding
everyone that all her collectibles
will end up there upon her death:
“These things that have been placed
in the Museum by myself are never
to be moved.” She chairs the newly
formed Committee on the Museum.
1905 In January, rat poison is
found in a bottle of water on Jane’s
nightstand. On February 28, Jane
dies in her room at the Moana Hotel
in Honolulu. The coroner declares
strychnine poisoning the cause. A
murder investigation begins March 1.
Harry Peterson celebrates Jane’s
fifty years of lace collecting with a
feature article in the Ladies’ Home
Journal.
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1906 On April 18, three-quarters
of the museum building is
destroyed during San Francisco’s
great earthquake. Over some
months, Harry Peterson salvages,
reorganizes, and inventories what is
left of the collection.
TIMELINE IMAGE CAPTIONS
1863: Governor Stanford Locomotive Entering Stanford Museum, 1916.
Stanford University Archives
1868: Portrait of Leland Stanford Jr. as an Infant, Original Carte de
Visite in Leland Stanford Photograph Album, n.d. Stanford University
Archives
1877–78: Photograph of the Art Gallery in the Stanford Family’s Nob Hill
Mansion, SF, Stanford Residence (San Francisco) Photograph Album, Picture
Gallery, n.d. Stanford University Archives
1881: Three Laborers Standing Outside the 1906 Earthquake Damage to
Exterior of the Leland Stanford Jr. Museum, c. 1906. Cantor Arts Center
1884: Display of the Cesnola Collection at the Leland Stanford Jr. Museum
after the 1906 Earthquake, 1906. Cantor Arts Center
1893: A Partial View of Ten Panel Folding Screen (ch’aekkori), c. 1890.
Cantor Arts Center; California Missions: San José de Guadalupe, 19th
century. Cantor Arts Center
1897: Mrs. Stanford’s Jewel Collection, 1898. Cantor Arts Center
1900–1901: Photograph of Mrs. Leland Stanford and Party Taken at Gizeh,
near Cairo on Jan 1, 1904, 1904. Stanford University Archives
1903: A Table of Recovered and Damaged Salviati Glass after the 1906
Earthquake, 1906. Stanford University Archives
1906: Two Figures, One Wearing Asian Armor, Outside of the Leland
Stanford Jr. Museum after the 1906 Earthquake, early 20th century.
Cantor Arts Center
MELANCHOLY MUSEUM OBJECTS
OHLONE MORTAR AND PESTLE
Stanford University Archaeology Collections
Leland Stanford Jr. was captivated
by ancient cultures of
Europe and Africa, but he
grounded his museum—literally—in
the local. A photograph
of his nascent collection shows
bowl-like mortars and long pestles
arranged on a floor. Used to
grind everything from spices
and nuts to medicines and meat,
the mortar and pestle was part of the essential tool kit for many cultures,
including the Muwekma Ohlone who originally inhabited the Bay Area and
continue to live here today. Jane Stanford took pains to attribute the discovery
of these artifacts to her son, writing on a surviving label: “[A]ll these Pestles
and Mortars [were] collected by Leland Stanford [Jr. him]self. They were
all plowed [an]d dug up on the Palo [Alto] Ranch.” From the boy’s tutor, we
know the child “would scour the farm” and “spend the day in the fields among
the laborers” collecting what ancestral Ohlone women left behind, such as
this stone set made between 6000 BCE and 1800 CE. Because stone tools
were heavy to carry, they often were cached at seasonal sites to await the
community’s return—or, in this case, to be uncovered centuries later by laborers
and an acquisitive boy.
Megan Rhodes Victor, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Archaeology
SHOVEL AND DETONATOR
Oakland Museum of California
In 1848, gold nuggets were found
unexpectedly in a stream near
Coloma, California. Despite efforts
to maintain secrecy, the discovery
captured the attention of three hundred
thousand eager fortune seekers,
who used tools like this shovel
and detonator to search for the
precious metal. Leland Stanford Sr.
sought to exploit the business opportunities engendered by the Gold Rush by
selling such equipment to miners, starting in late 1852 or early 1853. These
tools also helped build the Central Pacific Railroad that he cofounded with his
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Sacramento business partners. The influx of multiethnic European Americans,
Chinese, and South American migrant laborers as well as free and enslaved
Black Southerners who traveled to participate in the Gold Rush drastically
changed California’s demographics. At the same time, the local Native Americans
who were the land’s original inhabitants were starved, displaced, and
murdered. The opportunities and tragedies of the Gold Rush and the industries
it spawned invigorated California’s economy, making statehood possible in the
Compromise of 1850, which allowed California to enter the Union and raised
pertinent questions regarding the slave industry across the country.
Liv Porte, Curatorial Assistant, Cantor Arts Center
THE LAST SPIKE
Cantor Arts Center, gift of David Hewes
The “last spike” has a way of multiplying. The golden railroad spike that
Leland Stanford Sr. drove at Promontory, Utah, in 1869, symbolically uniting
the Union Pacific and Central Pacific into one transcontinental railroad, is at
the Cantor. But there is also the ordinary iron spike that replaced it at the end of
the ceremony, which Union Pacific fireman David Lemon promptly pocketed
as a memento. To add intrigue, the Stanford Golden Spike has an identical
twin, secretly commissioned
and kept in
obscurity by businessman
David Hewes, who
ensured that the telegraph
instantaneously
conveyed the joining of
the two railroad lines.
And to make counting
all but impossible, an uncertain number of miniature spikes have been made
from excess bits of the gold from the Stanford original; Hewes distributed
them as gifts to friends and family. All are equally historical relics and tourist
souvenirs, each imbued with some degree of authenticity from this transformative
moment in the history of the West.
Mitch Therieau, PhD candidate, Modern Thought and Literature
HORSE HOOF INKWELL
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford Family Collections
This lavishly decorated silver inkwell set within a horse’s hoof, made circa
1878, commemorates a stallion with a muddled history. In recollections of his
childhood published in 1945 by his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt fondly recalled Gloster as his father’s record-breaking
trotter, sold to Leland Stanford Sr. for $15,000 in 1873. One story goes that
Gloster died in a train wreck while being shipped to California in spring
1874, and a stable hand removed and mounted his tail and, many years later,
16
presented it in 1930 to Roosevelt, who
hung it in the governor’s mansion and
subsequently his White House bedroom
as a memento of his Hudson
Valley boyhood. In reality, Roosevelt’s
father, James, sold Gloster to another
New York horse breeder, Alden Goldsmith,
who sent the horse out West
to race against Stanford’s prize horse
Occident. Gloster died of lung fever
in San Francisco on October 30, 1874,
after a private contest but before the
public race. Thereafter, the Golden
Gate Agricultural Association had one of Gloster’s hooves mounted and
adorned with precious Western metals. But they neglected to pay the jeweler,
and so the jeweler sold the item to a Richard T. Carroll in 1879, who in turn
returned it to Goldsmith. How or when Leland Sr. acquired it, or whether this
is a different hoof, similarly mounted, remains unknown.
Mikaela Berkeley, Stanford ’20 and Paula Findlen, Ubaldo Pierotti
Professor of Italian History
E. E. ROGERS, ELECTIONEER
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford Family Collections
A dark bay horse with white pasterns on the hind legs, measuring about 15.2
hands (roughly five feet) tall at the withers, Electioneer (1868–1890) was a pillar
of Leland Stanford Sr.’s Palo Alto Stock Farm. Stanford purchased the virtually
untested Electioneer for $12,000 in 1876. The horse, described by trainer
Charles Marvin as “the perfection of driving power,” became foundational to
the growth of the Stock Farm. Using Electioneer purely as a stud horse, Stanford
experimented with different breeding and training techniques to produce
the world’s fastest trotters. As a result of the “Palo Alto system,” even today
Electioneer’s descendants hold virtually all trotting and pacing speed records.
The little-known artist E. E. Rogers created this somewhat inaccurate painting
of Electioneer in 1889. The
actual horse did not have spots
on his shoulder, and his hooves
were all the same color. Most
likely these mischaracterizations
resulted from the painting
being based on an imperfect
photograph.
Mahpiya Vanderbilt, Stanford
’19 and Alexander Veitch,
Stanford ’19
17

RENAISSANCE REVIVAL CLOCK
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford Family Collections
The Stanford family’s Renaissance Revival clock
was made in France around 1876. While sold by
Tiffany & Co., such a fine, elegant piece was
likely the work of multiple individuals, with the
maker controlling the overall quality. In 1876,
Tiffany & Co. made a dramatic impression on
Victorian crowds with a dazzling display of jewels
and silver goods at the Centennial Exposition
in Philadelphia, where Leland Stanford Sr.
bought Jane an exquisite Tiffany diamond necklace
and earrings for their tenth wedding anniversary.
This massive clock sat atop the mantel
of the receiving room, or India Room, in the Stanford family’s palatial Nob Hill
home, flanked by a pair of decorative urns and electric candelabras. In furnishings
as in jewelry, every object and decorative embellishment in any one
of the mansion’s fifty rooms was carefully arranged to represent the perfect
mix of antique and modern treasures of the finest quality. Like so many other
San Francisco residences, the Stanford mansion was lost in the 1906 earthquake,
but the clock remains.
Astrid Johannah Smith, Rare Book and Special Collections Digitization
Specialist and Stanford MLA candidate
WATERCOLOR PAINT SET
Cantor Arts Center,
Stanford Family Collections
This late nineteenth-century paint
set is composed of thirty different
color cakes, four ceramic holders,
and two small paintbrushes.
Housed in a Victorian wooden box,
it bears the logo of the London
company Winsor & Newton. This
set of “school colors” was most likely used by Leland Stanford Jr. when he
was learning to paint, perhaps during the summer of 1876 in White Harbor,
Maine, when he sketched the various ships on the water. Commercial in origin,
the color cakes were most likely fabricated industrially and therefore are
smooth and consistent. Watercolors are known for the ethereal, atmospheric
tones they can achieve, mostly through the layering of translucent washes of
diluted pigment. This particular paint set is a fitting palimpsest for the short
life of Leland Jr., whose death suspended an atmosphere of grief over his
household as well as the museum and university built in his honor.
María Gloria Robalino, PhD candidate, Comparative Literature
18
LELAND JR.’S CAMERA
AND PHOTO ALBUM
Cantor Arts Center,
Stanford Family Collections
Around 1880, Leland Stanford Jr.
acquired a device of technological
wonder to record his travels and other
interests. The Stanford family had for
years been acquainted with Eadweard
Muybridge, who is well known for his 1877–78 experimental images of the
Stanford horses in motion. The famed photographer’s presence at the Stock
Farm and Nob Hill mansion no doubt inspired young Leland’s interest in the
relatively new medium. The boy’s own camera was a cutting-edge marvel
comprised of a wooden frame and accordion body that allowed its user to
regulate the distance between the lens and interior glass negative, producing
greater clarity and depth of field than earlier models. Leland Jr.’s photographs
express the creativity and whimsical qualities typical of a young man exploring
the world. Mounted on the lined pages of notebooks, the inexpertly processed
photographs depict such subjects as the Nob Hill mansion, architectural elements
of a French cathedral, foreigners he encountered while touring Europe,
and a dog. The front cover of his 1880–81 Cahier de Photographies à Leland
Stanford (Book of Photographs by Leland Stanford) is decorated with a charming
drawing of a young boy composing a photograph under the camera’s cover.
Taylor Spann, Stanford ’21 and Susan Dackerman, John and Jill Freidenrich
Director, Cantor Arts Center
ROMAN CATTLE HORNS
Cantor Arts Center,
Stanford Family Collections
These horns are from a mature chianina bull, an
Italian cattle breed famous for its immense size
and stark white coloring. Its muscular frame and
classical origins probably satisfied the Stanfords’ desire for grandeur and
interest in Roman antiquity. When the family toured Europe in the 1880s,
they might have seen the chianina performing the role of a draft animal,
assisting the peasants who still endured a medieval sharecropping system.
Not only are the horns a piece of natural history, their high polish gives them
an artistic quality. They also may have appealed to the Stanfords as a symbol
of the burgeoning agricultural potential of the West: the Central Pacific
Railroad transported cattle hundreds of miles from the West and Texas to
butchers in the industrial cities of the Midwest and East. Thus, the horns are
both resonant of the rugged and awe-inspiring qualities of California, and
also have deep connections to the Old World and Victorian ideas of culture.
Jack Carney, Stanford ’21
19

ALABASTER FRUIT
Cantor Arts Center,
Stanford Family Collections
During Leland Stanford Jr.’s first trip to
Europe in 1880–81 he acquired some alabaster
fruit, perhaps in Nice. In the nineteenth
century, alabaster—an easy-to-carve, translucent gypsum that absorbs
color well—became a preferred medium for reproducing small antiquities and
architectural forms. Artisans could readily mimic the dull hue and fuzzy texture
of a peach, the brightly dappled skin of citrus, or the yellow-red sheen of
French apples. Carved bits of wood simulated the stems. It made great Victorian
food art, and the markets were flooded with alabaster souvenirs, even
though the prestige of the form was waning by the time the Stanfords were
traveling. Early visitors to the Nob Hill mansion described the fruit as sitting on
a marble platter, possibly arranged with other fake food, in Leland Jr.’s designed
display. After his death it became part of the museum’s collection, leading to
jokes about why Leland Jr.’s last breakfast was on exhibit.
Paula Findlen
I. W. TABER, LELAND JR.’S NOB HILL MUSEUM
Stanford University Archives
After Leland Stanford Jr. died in 1884, his mother, Jane Stanford, commissioned
photographs of her son’s burgeoning museum, then located on the top floor of
their Nob Hill mansion. The images document not only Leland Jr.’s vast collection
of arms and armor, stuffed birds, antiquities, and other curios, but also
his fastidious curatorial decisions. The collection eventually made the journey
from San Francisco to Palo Alto to take its rightful place in the Leland Stanford
Junior Museum, and the photographs provided a template for the new galleries
dedicated to the boy’s museological vision. Much as the Palo Alto Stock Farm
was transformed into a site of public education, Leland Jr.’s collection evolved
from a private cabinet into a fullfledged
public museum. Today, the
static photograph serves as a death
mask of sorts for this personal collection,
an indexical representation of a
child’s cabinet of wonders.
Anna Toledano, PhD candidate,
History of Science
LELAND JR.’S DEATH MASK
Stanford University Archives
This death mask captures the visage of Leland Stanford Jr. on March 13,
1884, upon his passing at the Hotel Bristol in Florence. Created just after
the fifteen-year-old boy succumbed to typhoid fever while traveling with
20
his parents on their second European trip, it
nonetheless seems like a sleeping portrait of a
beloved child. The softness of the lips and chalky
whiteness of the plaster create an eerie youthfulness
that affirms the very idea of the death
mask as a memento of mortality. Because the
cast of the face is a literal imprint of its model,
it captures an uncanny degree of detail: delicate
wrinkles around the eyes, individual hairs of the
brows and lashes, even the slightest protrusion
of a forehead vein. This realism is what makes the death mask so haunting,
reminding us of the lasting presence of a boy whose life ended too soon.
Meagan Wu, MA in Art History ’19
PORCELAIN CUP AND SAUCER
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford Family Collections
This nineteenth-century cup and saucer
were most likely part of a dinner service
belonging to the Stanford family. Made of
porcelain and covered in a shiny black
glaze, their style is opulently art nouveau.
The intricate gilt pattern on the lip of the
cup and edge of the plate, and the black
and gold colors, are likewise characteristic
of the style. Their excellent condition suggests that they were part of the
special dinner service for the funeral of Leland Stanford Jr. in 1884, or for
mourning occasions in general. Were they purchased by Jane and Leland Sr.
after their son’s death? Because of their funereal character, it is also possible
that this cup and saucer belonged to an afternoon tea set that Jane used after
her husband and son were entombed in the Stanford Mausoleum in 1893.
María Gloria Robalino
BLACK OSTRICH FEATHER FAN
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford Family Collections
A cursive monogrammed S marks the verso of this fan as a Stanford family
possession. The twirling, textured black ostrich plumes and incandescent
mother-of-pearl ribs suggest a combination of delicacy and strength that well
defined Jane Stanford. During her extensive travels she
collected hundreds of fans that accompanied her at
social functions and became part of her elaborate
wardrobe (but most of the others are missing
the Stanford monogram). Such an accessory
suggests opulence, excess, and decadence, and
the fan itself something of feminine affectation.
21

In the hands of such a woman, of course, fanning would have been a feigned
delicacy that dissimulated her power. While Jane often deferred to her husband
publicly, she was the matriarch who, after the death of her son in 1884,
took charge of the creation of a museum in Leland Stanford Jr.’s memory.
After her husband’s death in 1893, she controlled the university as well.
Juliana Nalerio, PhD candidate, Modern Thought and Literature
BANQUET MENU
Stanford University Archives
Celebratory banquets in the Gilded
Age were extravagant but frequent
affairs for members of high society.
This banquet, held in honor of
Leland Stanford Sr. and Republican
representatives of Congress elect,
took place at the Palace Hotel in
San Francisco on November 21,
1888. In typical period fashion, the
meal consisted of multiple courses,
each highlighting luxurious or sought- after ingredients such as oysters,
turtle, foie gras, and capon. Diners would take a beverage break during the
middle of the feast, pausing to imbibe punch, a rum-based drink served at
ceremonial events. The surfeit of food and alcohol offered at these gatherings
reinforced the social positions of all in attendance, both demonstrating the
host’s ability to source and provide such a lavish affair, and allowing guests
to be waited upon by extremely attentive staff. As the meals might last up
to five hours, these events of purported leisure often ironically turned into
drawn-out performances of conspicuous consumption.
Aleesa Pitcharman Alexander, Assistant Curator of American Art,
Cantor Arts Center
WAGE RECEIPTS
Stanford University Archives
The Stanfords hired both a permanent and
a seasonal labor force to maintain their
eight-thousand-acre Palo Alto estate. Wages were disbursed monthly, on Saturday
mornings at the pay table, in the form of gold and silver coins. Workers
preferred coins, as most people did not bank their earnings and had to pay a fee
to get a check cashed. They signed receipts indicating amounts received. Head
horse trainer Charles Marvin earned $250 per month, while cook Ah Joe and
China Boss of Garden and Grounds Ah Jim earned $50 per month. In the 1880s
the average estate worker at Palo Alto earned anywhere from $1 to $1.33 per day,
working seven days per week, twelve hours per day. To defray payroll and other
costs of running the university, Leland Stanford Sr. routinely wrote checks out of
22
his personal funds. After Leland Stanford Sr.’s death in 1893 there was a massive
layoff of estate workers, and the remaining estate and university employees took
a steep pay cut that persisted for another seven years.
Julie Cain, Historic Preservation Planner at Stanford University
FLOWERPOT
Stanford University Archaeology Collections
This terra-cotta flowerpot, recovered as fragments
from the site of the Stanford mansion in Palo Alto,
may appear plain at first glance, but this unremarkable
pot actually speaks to the presence of the bright
array of flowers grown at the Stanford Stock Farm
and, later, on the grounds of the university. Just as a flowerpot indicates the
presence of flower gardens, it also signals the presence of gardeners. Many
of the laborers, including gardeners, who worked at the Stock Farm and the
university during this period were Chinese, and some may have lived in the
Arboretum Chinese Labor Quarters, which was active from the early 1880s
until 1925. These gardeners worked to shape the landscape of Stanford University
as it appears today. All of the now-iconic palms on Palm Drive were
planted by Chinese workers, who also dug and planted the Oval and likely
planted the gardens and orchards that adorn the Main Quadrangle.
Megan Rhodes Victor
SALVIATI MOSAIC WORKERS
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford Museum Collections
This 1902 photograph captures artisans at work in the Venice studio of Salviati
& Co. preparing materials for Stanford Memorial Church’s glass mosaic
program. Jane Stanford had long admired the glittering Byzantine mosaics
of Constantinople and Venice, cities she visited with her husband and son in
the 1880s. After their deaths, she sought to memorialize them in grandiose
fashion, and chose the medium of mosaic to adorn the interior and the facade
of the church as well as the exterior of the Leland Stanford Junior Museum,
which is decorated with scenes related to Leland Jr.’s interests. Jane already
had a long-standing relationship with the Salviati firm when she commissioned
this massive project. Her interest in mosaics and glasswork was also
in keeping with period tastes. During the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Venice was a top tourist destination
for American elites, which stimulated
the Venetian glass revival; the glass was
brought across the Atlantic and sold at luxury
stores like Tiffany and Co., fueling market
and institutional interest in such goods.
Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander
23

BOURBON BOTTLES
Stanford University Archaeology Collections
Archaeologists are in the business of turning trash
into treasure. In summer 2012, Stanford archaeology
students excavated broken glass bottles from
the former site of the Searsville Dam on Stanford
lands. While the recovered bottles no longer serve
their original purpose of containing medicinal curatives,
foodstuffs, and liquor, they still play a role
in the narrative of Stanford history. Their color,
material, shape, size, and inscriptions communicate
their age and their original contents. A bottle with a deep blue hue that once
held Bromo-Seltzer, an effervescent powder that relieved stomach pain, was
shipped via cross-country train from Baltimore. The coffee-brown color of these
J. H. Cutter bourbon bottles protected the locally distributed whiskey within
from sunlight and spoilage. The bottles, most likely discarded by the damkeeper
himself, are inherently intimate objects. They were reached for in times
of pain, their curative contents ingested. All that remains is the shattered glass.
Anna Toledano
JANE’S JEWELRY
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford Family Collections
A rococo brooch, two bracelets, a hair comb, and a pair of earrings—each one
a paste replica of the original—are all that remain of Jane Stanford’s prodigious
jewelry collection. At one point Jane owned thirty-four different sets, valued at
$500,000. Leland Stanford Sr. acquired the first of these extravagant pieces
for his wife in Paris in 1880. But the opulent jewels belied his railroad’s inability
to pay back government bonds. When the university fell into insolvency after
Leland Sr.’s death, Jane endeavored unsuccessfully to sell the pieces abroad at
Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee. Two years later, she hired I. W. Tabor
& Co. to photograph the collection and its “precious memories,” and she commissioned
a painting of her jewels from Astley Middleton Cooper, an eccentric
drunk who discreetly sold a copy of the painting to a gambling house. We do
not know when the paste replicas
were made—whether it was
around the time Jane was trying
to monetize her assets, or much
earlier. In any case, a few years
after her death, university trustees
sold the jewels to endow the
Jewel Fund, which still supports
library acquisitions today.
Alexander Veitch
SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPH
Stanford University Archives
Surrounded by an ethereal haze, the apparition
of a beautiful young woman hovers
before a thickly mustachioed Victorian
gentleman. This “spirit photograph” was
a gift from the youngest and purportedly
most eccentric of the six Stanford brothers,
Thomas Welton Stanford, who purchased
it during a trip to Australia. He married in
1869, but his wife died only a year later; this
tragedy likely motivated his role in founding
the Victorian Association of Progressive
Spiritualists in 1870. Spiritualists believed
that they could communicate with the dead, a notion that underpinned their
religious movement. They conducted parlor séances and circulated spirit
photographs. Leland Stanford Sr. and Jane Stanford were not immune to the
appeal of communicating with the afterlife, and Jane especially was drawn
to Spiritualism. After the tragic loss of her son, she must have taken great
comfort in the idea that he was not only at peace, but perhaps still present
and even reachable in some manner.
Astrid Johannah Smith
POISON BOTTLE
Stanford University Archaeology Collections
This small, broken, cobalt-blue bottle manufactured by Whitall
Tatum between 1875 and 1901 is probably from the Stanfords’
medicine cabinet. Exactly what it contained is unknown, but
the distinctive color and quilted-diamond pattern indicate
that it was certainly a medicinal poison. During the nineteenth
century, poisons enjoyed a wide variety of uses; for
instance strychnine was the preferred stimulant in energy
tonics. Olympic athletes used it to enhance performance,
with predictably awful results. One could pop strychnine
pills, use strychnine-laced ointments to increase sexual
potency, or ingest small quantities for incontinence, constipation,
diphtheria, chronic bronchitis, angina pectoris, heart
trouble—even the typhoid fever that took the life of Leland Stanford Jr. It was
regarded as a potent, all-purpose lubricant for the human system. Did a similar
bottle make the voyage from California to Hawaii, where it became the
means for the sudden and dramatic death of Jane Stanford on February 28,
1905? She demonstrated the classic signs of strychnine poisoning.
Paula Findlen
24
25

Leland Stanford Sr. and
the Central Pacific Railroad
MITCH THERIEAU
PhD candidate, Modern Thought and Literature
THE STORY OF THE CENTRAL PACIFIC RAILROAD IN THE 1860S BEGINS
and ends with gold. Leland Stanford Sr. and Collis Huntington, who
directed the railroad in its early years alongside Charles Crocker and
Mark Hopkins, made their first fortunes in Sacramento selling tools to
the prospectors who flocked to California in the wake of the 1849 Gold
Rush. This prospect of wealth attracted Theodore Judah, a New York
railroad engineer fixated on the notion of building a transcontinental
railroad. After a few failed efforts to fundraise, Judah persuaded Leland Sr.
and his three associates to go into business with him. On June 28, 1861,
on the strength of the associates’ capital and Judah’s almost evangelical
enthusiasm, the Central Pacific was incorporated. The Pacific Railroad
Acts of 1862 and 1864 financially supported the completion of roughly
half of the transcontinental railroad, with the other half to be undertaken
by the newly formed Union Pacific.
In the middle of his efforts to get the Central Pacific off the ground,
Thomas Hill (1829–1908), The Driving of the Last Spike, 1881.
California State Railroad Museum
26
Alfred A. Hart (1816-1906), The Last Rail Is Laid. Scene at Promontory
Point, May 10, 1869, 1869. Stanford University Archives
Leland Sr. was elected governor of California. A known railroad
proponent, he rarely missed an opportunity to mention the benefits that
long-distance rail travel would bring to the state. Even in his inaugural
address, he emphasized that a transcontinental railroad would make
it easier for California to trade with Nevada, where significant gold
and silver deposits had been discovered. Of course, given his business
arrangements, such a railroad would bring significant monetary gain
to Leland Sr., too. Still, this mixing of the railroad, personal profit, and
political interests cut both ways, as he used his authority as governor
to raise funds for the Central Pacific. Gold helped foment the desire
that gave birth to the Central Pacific, and gold had a hand in shaping
its route across the West; thus, it was only appropriate that gold would
commemorate its completion.
On May 10, 1869, near Promontory, Utah, after more than six years
of brutal exploitation and unfathomable misery on the part of Chinese
migrant workers in particular, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific
were joined with a Golden Spike. Fittingly, it was Leland Sr. who gently
tapped this spike into a tie made of California laurel. Then the Golden
Spike was quickly un-driven, and an undocumented railroad worker
drove in the iron spike that would supposedly serve as the real final link
between East and West. The Golden Spike became part of the room of
Stanford memorabilia installed in 1893, the year of Leland Sr.’s death,
reminding visitors of the origins of the wealth that built this university.
27

Immigrant Labor
on the Stanford Estate
LAURA JONES
Director of Heritage Services and University Archaeologist
BECAUSE LELAND STANFORD SR. AND JANE STANFORD WERE AMONG
the richest people in the United States and widely known for their
audacious ambitions, job seekers often walked the long road to their
Palo Alto Stock Farm office and asked for work. The Stanfords also
sought and found workers through social clubs and trade associations,
often hiring based on national origin and ethnic ties. California’s
perceived religious tolerance and ethnic diversity made the state a
destination for European immigrants as well as immigrants from the
Pacific Rim, including settlers from Mexico, Peru, Chile, China, Japan,
and the Philippines.
In the years just before the founding of the university, the Stanfords
employed about a hundred year-round workers to tend their horses,
vineyards, orchards, crops, and gardens. Nearly half of these were
Chinese, with the rest hailing from the Stanfords’ home state of
New York and a scattering of men from Scotland, Ireland, and
England. “Gangs” of Chinese men were hired as temporary laborers
to handle special projects such as the building of Lagunita Dam and
the expansion of the vineyards. Although Chinese workers were not
welcomed by the building trade unions, they dominated agricultural
work during the construction of the university, including farming,
landscaping, gardening, and work with the horses.
In its early years the campus also had Chinese cooks and a Chinese
laundry, and faculty homes had Chinese or Japanese servants. The
Stanford family had an English butler in San Francisco and a Chinese
butler, Ah Sing, at their Palo Alto home. While none of the twenty-two
“married men with families” who were given turkeys on Thanksgiving
in 1884 were from China, at least one Chinese foreman, Jim Mock,
was able to bring his wife to live on the Stanford estate. Jane Stanford
gave engraved silver christening cups to the Mocks’ two sons and
wrote letters of support for the family as they struggled to maintain
their ties to relatives in China after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
left: Construction
Gang, c. 1880–89.
Stanford University
Archives
below: S.B. Dole
(1844–1926),
Cooking under
Difficulties after
1906 Earthquake,
1906. Stanford
University Archives
made travel between
the two countries
difficult. The restrictions
of the Exclusion Act
diminished the number
of Chinese workers in
the 1890s.
Trade unions and
newspapers monitoring
Leland Sr.’s activities
closely observed the
building of the university
and published letters demanding that he “recognize the interests of
the people of California” and not employ “foreign scabs” or “tramps” on
the campus. Nearly all the construction work on the campus buildings
was performed by union workers, with workers from particular
immigrant groups dominating particular trades, such as brick masons
from Ireland and stone cutters and carvers from Italy. Thanks to
her extensive travels Jane Stanford had long-standing relationships
with Italian craft workshops and paid experts from the Salviati & Co.
glassworks to travel from Venice to create the mosaics on the exterior
of the museum and in Memorial Church. After the 1906 earthquake,
Venetian master mosaic artist Maurizio Camerino returned to the
campus from Salviati & Co. to supervise reconstruction of the mosaics
at Memorial Church. The family’s domestic workers were nearly all
foreign born; most of the women on Jane’s long list of maids had
immigrated from Ireland, England, or Germany.
28
29

The Palo Alto Stock Farm
MAHPIYA VANDERBILT
Stanford ’19
AFTER THE COMPLETION OF THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD
in 1869, Leland Stanford Sr. was exhausted. His doctor prescribed
a vacation, but instead he purchased Occident, “a little horse that
turned out remarkably fast.” His fascination with horses led to the
establishment of the Palo Alto Stock Farm in 1876, an enterprise that
eventually grew to cover more than eight thousand acres of Santa
Clara Valley land and included barns for colts and trotters in training,
a carriage house with second-floor staff residences, blacksmiths’ and
wheelwrights’ shops, dozens of paddocks, and multiple racetracks.
In winter 1876 Leland Sr. significantly expanded the operation by
acquiring twelve mares and his prize sire, Electioneer, from the New York
stud farm Stony Ford for $41,200. His objective was to set speed records
in harness racing, then the most popular racing sport, by breeding and
training the best trotters in the world. By 1882 there were more than 350
horses on the farm, and by 1891 approximately 750 horses, making it one
of the largest training facilities in the United States. At its peak the Stock
Farm employed almost 150 people, many of them Chinese immigrants,
to feed, train, and care for the horses as well as maintain tracks, farm the
land, and operate and repair equipment.
To this day, the Palo Alto Stock Farm is renowned for its creation
of a new and innovative training system to increase speed. Developed
with trainer Charles Marvin, the method involved running horses in
short bursts starting at a young age. After Leland Sr.’s death in 1893
Jane Stanford continued the farm in her husband’s memory, but she
finally closed it in 1903 and all the horses were auctioned off. Today, its
legacy lives on in the university’s nickname, “The Farm.”
Horse Relics
ALEXANDER VEITCH
Stanford ’19
The Red Barn on the Palo Alto Stock Farm, late 1880s.
Stanford University Archives
30
THE PALO ALTO STOCK FARM WAS MORE THAN MERELY THE
precursor of Stanford University; it was the epicenter of a sporting
empire that remains unparalleled in horse racing and beyond. The
farm produced California’s first celebrity athletes—equine rather
than human—many of whose speed records stand unbroken today. In
Leland Stanford Sr.’s estimation, the success of his racing “trotters”
rivaled his achievements as a railroad magnate. Oddly enough, relics
of the Stanfords’ horses expose a great deal about the new Californian
elite of the Victorian era. As products of wealth and science, horses
projected the status of their breeders. Leland Sr. preserved traces
of his most prized horses as instantiations of his own manifest
superiority. These mementos ranged from the artistic and aesthetic to
the anatomical and macabre.
In 1891, the newly mounted skeleton of Electioneer, the farm’s
greatest sire, was readied for display to great fanfare in the Leland
Stanford Junior Museum. A horse that bred but never raced,
Electioneer stood for a perfect genomic type, one that echoed the
racial science of the era. After viewing the skeleton, one journalist
31

Palo Alto Spring:
The Martyrdom of Time
ALEXANDER NEMEROV
Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities
Ears of the Trotting Champion Electioneer (1868–1890), 1890.
Cantor Arts Center
triumphantly declared that the stallion “was born in the purple and
deserved a monarch’s care.” More than any other museum exhibit, this
one made the national news.
Other relics adorned Leland Sr.’s desk as reminders of the prowess
of his prize trotters. Electioneer’s severed ears evoked his intelligence
and personality, while Gloster’s hoof was fashioned into an inkwell, a
gift from a fellow breeder who hoped to test the speed of his trotter
against Leland Sr.’s Occidental. These objects speak to the peculiar
Victorian obsession with deathly remains, and strangely evoke the
Stanfords’ success in giving birth to a great equine genealogy, even
as the death of their only son ended all hopes for an heir to the family
fortune.
THOMAS HILL’S PALO ALTO SPRING (1878) IS A GHOST STORY ABOUT
representation itself. Hill made it ghostly by copying too earnestly
the photographs on which he based the figures’ likenesses. The eerie
misfortune of his method is that each face looks like a photograph
of a face. Since a photograph fixes a person like a dried butterfly on
pasteboard, the hosts and guests at little Leland Stanford Jr.’s mournful
croquet match do not enjoy the sunshine. Famous and forgotten, both
living and dead, they sit stiffly in a drawer of time.
Everyone is eerily isolated. Hill imported the privacy of the photographic
studio with each likeness, then combined all these individualities
into a great array of solitudes. Everyone in Palo Alto Spring appears
alone with their thoughts, even on this social occasion. Each appears
distracted, not quite there, as if preoccupied by memories of when their
photograph was taken. At this party, everyone is a wallflower, everyone
is awkward.
It is a social dilemma. It is also a mystery of time. Leland Stanford Sr.
wanted Hill to base Palo Alto Spring on photographs so that it would
be as realistic as possible, but the artist followed the order so
enthusiastically that he created another, more disturbing kind of
realism. The painting says that we are all of our moment—that we all
are ghosts leaving a photographic record that says, in advance of
our demise, we will have been. Not that Hill strove for such mordancy.
A poor magician, he mixed his powders and potions wrong, overpouring
the deathly stuff of photography. He spilled the vial when only
a pinch or dram was called for. Instead of life, he created a frozen echo.
The ritual feeling of Palo Alto Spring is grave. Most everyone on
the left side appears to be watching the croquet shot happening
on the right. There, two boys—one standing, one kneeling—gallantly
assist a girl preparing her shot. Although the subject is plausible
enough, the expectant moment (imagine a golf crowd hushed on
the eighteenth hole) gives the picture an eerie solemnity. Everyone
32
33

Thomas Hill (1829–1908), Palo Alto Spring, 1878. Cantor Arts Center
34
35

is poised like angels at a holy birth, like witnesses at a sacred rite—
the tenth birthday of the only son and heir. The Stanfords and their
guests call to mind a heavenly host sitting in judgment among the
clouds. Prematurely in heaven, too quickly elevated to gods, they
judge their earthly actions with the inscrutable detachment of
deities. Croquet mallets take on the gravity of Jovian scepters and
thunderbolts. Refreshments are celestial, the lemonade of Ganymede.
Mortal divinities, saints of the Olympian lawn, they have suffered the
martyrdom of time.
The Damkeeper’s Grief
LAURA JONES
Director of Heritage Services and University Archaeologist
THE SEARSVILLE DAM WAS COMPLETED IN 1891 AS CLASSES BEGAN
at the newly established Leland Stanford Junior University. Leland
Stanford Sr. contracted with the Spring Valley Water Company for
water from the reservoir for the school, and a series of massive iron
pipes were laid, linking the dam to the campus four miles downstream.
The water company employed a resident damkeeper charged with
measuring the depth of the reservoir and the amount of rainfall, and
opening and closing the outlet pipes accordingly. Searsville Dam’s
second damkeeper, Edgar Batchelder, lived in a small cottage above
the dam with his wife and children. In 2012 a team of Stanford
archaeologists discovered the site of this residence, which had been
demolished nearly a century before. Excavation of a trash pit near the
cottage recovered more than eight thousand artifacts, including two
liquor bottles, which were found in layers of historic trash, lying among
charred fragments of women’s clothing, shoes, jewelry, and a parasol.
In 1903 Batchelder’s wife, Emeline, died in childbirth at the isolated
cottage on the lake. The bereaved damkeeper probably placed her
belongings in the pit and set them aflame. Perhaps he stirred the
fire with one of the recovered J. H. Cutter bourbon whiskey bottles.
Eventually Batchelder remarried, wedding the local farmer’s daughter
he had hired to care for his children. The family then moved to
Burlingame to assist with reconstruction of water pipelines after the
1906 earthquake, leaving behind the buried relics of his grief.
36
A Boy’s Cabinet: Origins of the
Leland Stanford Junior Museum
PAULA FINDLEN
Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History
LELAND STANFORD JR. GREW UP IN A GILDED AGE HOME FILLED
with real and alleged Old Masters, iconic paintings of the US West,
even an onyx table made from a slab of marble cut from a column in
Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He dug up Ohlone stone mortars and
pestles on the Palo Alto farm. He enjoyed bird shooting and collected
stones. Clocks, cameras, and other gadgetry fascinated him. His
parents encouraged his curiosity. It is little wonder that he envisioned
himself a collector.
I. W. (Isaiah West) Taber (1830–1912), Leland Stanford Jr.’s Toys and
Museum Objects, n.d. Stanford University Archives
37

War excited him. During his first trip to Europe in 1880–81 he
acquired bullets from Waterloo, Napoleon III’s spur, and recent relics of
the Franco-Prussian War and the suppression of the Paris Commune.
He toured the great European museums and trolled curiosity shops
and old markets. His mother, Jane Stanford, read aloud tales of ancient
Rome and Pompeii’s destruction. By age thirteen he envisioned himself
creating a great museum for San Francisco.
In summer 1882, a room on the third floor of the Stanford mansion
on Nob Hill became the original site of his collection. Over the doorway
Leland Jr. proudly mounted “a large stuffed turkey buzzard” that glared
malevolently down upon a cannonball retrieved from Fort Sumter. An
Islamic scimitar, a Persian helmet, a Prussian foot soldier’s cap and
kit, antique muskets, pistols, swords, faux medieval armor, and many
other bellicose artifacts festooned the walls and filled the cabinets.
A panoply of stuffed birds sacrificed their lives to become mute
witnesses to this theater of war.
There were US relics on display as well: Marquis de Lafayette’s
cane, a 1799 deposit slip signed by George Washington, and minerals
from Battle Mountain,
Nevada, where
the Central Pacific
railroad serviced the
mines. A handful of
Pacific Islanders’ tools
and weapons, New
Mexican pottery and
baskets, and Alaskan
artifacts completed
the initial collection.
Thus, the Leland
Stanford Junior
Museum was born as
an eclectic Nob Hill
cabinet of curiosities
arranged, catalogued,
Stanford University Photographic Department, and labeled by a
Model of Knight of Middle Ages Armed Cap-Ateenager.
Pie, Ancient and Oriental Arms Made in Paris,
On May 26, 1883,
Arranged by Leland Stanford Jr., c. 1880.
Stanford University Archives
Leland Jr. departed
again for Europe. From London, he sent instructions home to keep his
arms and armor polished. At the Louvre in Paris he decoded Egyptian
hieroglyphs. In Frankfurt he triumphantly purchased an “iron-shod
piece of timber” allegedly from Julius Caesar’s bridge across the
Rhine. In Marseille he saw a curious late-antique cross. Salviati & Co.’s
marvelously modern technique for making mosaic glass delighted
him in Venice, and he acquired glass mosaic pieces from the Hagia
Sophia in Constantinople. In snowy Athens he reached the climax of
his invigorating and well-planned Grand Tour. German archaeologist
Heinrich Schliemann presented him with a gift of small earthenware
household fetishes from the ancient Greek community of Troad in
Anatolia. By now, Leland Jr.’s bags were bursting with antiquities.
His death in Florence on March 13, 1884, killed the young collector,
but not his collection. The Stanfords brought back everything
Leland Jr. acquired during this ill-fated trip. They filled a second
room of their mansion with Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities,
including a mummified crocodile and two ancient Greek Tanagra
terra-cotta figurines. One was a startlingly lifelike depiction of a Greek
woman nursing a child that must have been especially meaningful to
his mother.
Knowing that their son had planned to collect “Chinese and
Japanese curios” and “the relics of the American mound builders,” the
Stanfords proceeded to acquire great quantities of them; for instance
they purchased hundreds of duplicates of Cypriote antiquities from the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The museum now occupied
three rooms. Jane deposited her son’s wooden carvings of dogs, horses,
and other decorative motifs in this extension of his boyhood “cabinet.”
In 1886, his tutor Herbert Charles Nash published The Leland
Stanford, Jr. Museum: Origin and Description. Jane insisted on having
an exact replica of these rooms created in the university museum,
with artifacts displayed precisely as they were in San Francisco. The
original cabinet became the affective nucleus of a vast new institution.
Leland Jr. remains the genius loci of the museum. The Leland
Stanford Junior Museum began as an act of sublime love emerging,
like any good Greek tragedy, from a wellspring of sorrow. It begat
grandiose mourning and accidentally gave birth to an institution. Built
upon an edifice of unquestioned wealth and power, it blithely ignored
the daily travails of those who labored to make it possible. Such were
the quixotic origins of the university and museum we still enjoy today.
38
39

Spiritual Afterlives
MURPHY TEMPLE
PhD candidate, History, and
ASTRID JOHANNAH SMITH
Rare Book and Special Collections Digitization Specialist
and Stanford MLA candidate
THE STANFORDS BELIEVED IN THE “ETERNAL ESSENCE” OF THE
soul, as proclaimed by Jane Stanford’s inscription in honor of her
husband on the east transept wall of Stanford Memorial Church. Death
was a gateway to a new form of existence. Jane’s words, carved in
stone, suggest a desire to transcend mortality. Leland Stanford Jr.’s
death in 1884 shook the very foundations of the Stanfords’ faith that
a life well lived would reap its loving rewards. Nondenominational
Protestants, with an appreciation of Roman Catholicism from their
travels and especially from Jane’s fascination with the Spanish
missions of Alta California, they explored varied means to give their
son his immortality and keep him present in their lives.
In Paris and New York, the grief-stricken parents attended séances,
hoping to contact their beloved son’s departed soul. Former president
Slate Apport, n.d. Stanford University Archives
Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia, introduced them to Doctor John
Philip Newman, a Methodist minister known for his rousing brand
of Spiritualism, and his wife, Angeline, who acted as a medium. The
Stanfords invited the Newmans to accompany them to California
to preside over Leland Jr.’s memorial service on November 27, 1884.
Leland Sr. remained skeptical that the Newmans’ séances would
permit them to communicate with their son, and Jane reluctantly
agreed that the results were disappointing. The Newmans returned
east, leaving behind rumors that the Stanfords were committed
Spiritualists who founded their university by consulting a medium.
For Leland Sr., immortality took the concrete form of a university. He
used his immense fortune to rethink education, building an institution
to prepare students—men and women, rich and poor—“for personal
success and direct usefulness in life.” He called them missionaries for a
new ideal. Late in life, his tender affection for his equine progeny struck
contemporaries as filling the emotional void created by his son’s death.
Jane’s views of how her spirit might exist in perpetuity evolved
with the university. She envisioned Memorial Church as Stanford’s
heart and soul, nurturing the spiritual lives of her adoptive sons and
daughters while memorializing her family. The sandstone, stained
glass, and inscriptions in the church—her “jewel box”—were of her own
design. While visiting her brother-in-law Thomas Welton Stanford
during a 1903 trip to Australia, she found his intense spiritualism
disturbing—a sign that she had moved beyond her early efforts to
speak with the dead by any means. Welton bequeathed an endowment
for psychic studies at Stanford with his collection of apports
(objects enabling communication with the dead). While fated to be a
perpetually grieving mother and widow, Jane remained frustrated by
Spiritualism, finding her son more readily in the church and private
home chapels, in the mausoleum, and in the survival of his collection.
In his 1906 Founder’s Day address, philosopher and psychologist
William James emphasized the university’s spiritual qualities. He
argued that spiritual life arose from the contagious effect of human
spirits imprinting themselves in the objects, places, and ideas that they
touched or fostered. While the bodies of the Stanford family rest in
their mausoleum—Jane situated eternally between her husband and
her son—their spirits still suffuse every aspect of the university around
them, including the museum, where they live on through artifacts that
evoke their own curiosity, taste, and passion for discovering the world.
40
41

Who Killed Jane Stanford?
RICHARD WHITE
Margaret Byrne Professor of American History
IN MARCH 1905, A CORONER’S JURY IN HONOLULU ISSUED ITS
verdict on the death of Jane Stanford on February 28, 1905, “from
strychnine poisoning, said strychnine having been introduced into a
bottle of bicarbonate of soda with felonious intent by some person or
persons to this Jury unknown.”
Jane had fled one poisoning only to fall victim to another. When she
departed San Francisco on February 15 en route to Japan by way of
Hawaii, she was a shaken and frightened woman. In January, someone
had put rat poison in the bottle of Poland Water at her bedside in her
Nob Hill mansion. She told George Crothers—an advisor and trustee
whose influence sprang in part from his resemblance to her dead son—
that she feared a second attempt.
Jane died in agony in her room at the Moana Hotel. Her longtime
companion and secretary, Bertha Berner, recorded her saying, “Oh
God, forgive me my sins,” followed by, “Is my soul prepared to meet
my dear ones?” Her last words were, “This is a horrible death to die.”
One physician called to her hotel room reported that the last spasm
left her hands “firmly clinched with her thumbs bent inward. Her knees
were apart, the sole [sic] of her feet were turned up and the arch was
marked.” Her pupils were dilated and her eyes bulged. All classic signs
of strychnine poisoning.
The San Francisco poisoning investigation was still under way when
Jane died. Stanford University, wracked by five years of scandals and
controversies, did not want any more sensational and embarrassing
stories. University president David Starr Jordan, the trustees, and Jane’s
lawyers tried to suppress and then deny news of the first poisoning.
They failed. The attempted murder dominated the “yellow press” of the
era as an amalgam of speculation, fact, and fiction.
Jules Callundan of Morse Detective Agency took charge of the
investigation. Briefly a member of the San Francisco Police Department—
and no stranger to corruption himself—he had resigned under a cloud
Léon-Joseph-Florentin Bonnat (1833–1922), Jane Lathrop Stanford, 1881.
Cantor Arts Center
42
43

ut remained well connected: a
congressman’s son-in-law who routinely
worked for the rich, which sometimes
involved concealing evidence and lying.
Callundan and the police questioned the
servants. Bertha appeared to implicate
Ah Wing, who had been in the Stanfords’
employ for years. The newspapers
suspected a British-born maid and the
Death Mask of Jane Lathrop butler. Reporters wrote that the police were
Stanford, 1905. Stanford about to make arrests. They never did.
University Archives
Bertha was the only person present
at both poisonings. Before departing
for Hawaii, she brought the bottle later found to contain strychnine to
a Palo Alto pharmacy to be filled with bicarbonate of soda. Bertha’s
brother proclaimed her innocence, even though at the time no one had
actually accused her. Her mother supposedly told reporters that she
knew who the murderer was, yet she never revealed the name.
There was no real police investigation following the second
poisoning. Before departing for Hawaii to claim Jane’s body, David
Starr Jordan and Timothy Hopkins, the latter a university trustee and
family friend, told the press that strychnine was not the cause of death,
insisting that Jane died of natural causes. The sheriff in Honolulu
washed his hands of the case, saying that it belonged to the San
Francisco police. At Callundan’s urging, the police accepted Jordan’s
version of events and dropped the investigation. The police apparently
did not know that Jane had been planning to dismiss both Jordan and
Hopkins when she returned to San Francisco.
The 1906 earthquake destroyed the San Francisco police records.
The president of the board of trustees, Samuel Leib, destroyed
most of his correspondence with Jane around the time of her death.
Those who knew of Jane’s fears and her intention to fire Jordan and
Hopkins said nothing. University officials gave Jane a lavish funeral in
Memorial Church. They instructed the ministers giving the eulogies
not to mention the poisonings. Jordan famously celebrated Jane
Stanford as “a good woman.” His indifference to her vision for the
museum, coupled with budgetary problems and tough decisions about
rebuilding after the 1906 earthquake, all but ensured the neglect of the
museum so important to Jane Stanford and the memory of her son.
The 1906 and 1989 Earthquakes
ANNA TOLEDANO
PhD candidate, History of Science
IN THE EARLY MORNING OF APRIL 18, 1906, THE GREAT SAN FRANCISCO
earthquake caused earth-shattering damage to the young Stanford
University campus. The Main Quadrangle, the architectural dream of
Leland Stanford Sr., emerged largely unscathed. The Leland Stanford
Junior Museum, however, was not so lucky. While the reinforced
concrete and steel-girded main section—the first large building of
its kind—remained intact, the brick additions that Jane Stanford added
after Leland Sr.’s death to house the ever-growing collection were
decimated.
B. E. Jenney, Stanford Room in the Stanford University Museum, 1906.
Stanford University Archives
44
45

Students Reassembling Pottery after the 1906 Earthquake in the Stanford
Museum Basement, 1953. Stanford University Archives
Jane had poured her heart and soul into the very cement of the
museum. With three hundred thousand square feet of exhibition space
at the time of its destruction, the building was the largest private
museum in the country. Jane died a year before the calamity hit, so she
was fortunate not to witness the decimation of the magnificent edifice.
Curiously, amid the fragmented and broken remains of priceless
antiquities, artworks, and artifacts, the memorial family galleries in the
main building survived mostly untouched.
In the wake of the destruction, the university’s president, David
Starr Jordan, privileged the institution’s educational role over its role
as a memorial, prioritizing the restoration of the badly damaged library
building over that of the museum. The board of trustees was similarly
skeptical of the museum’s academic purpose. Since the museum had
no separate endowment to sustain it after such an emergency, the
building—along with Jane’s vision—lay in ruins.
The surviving galleries reopened in 1909 to little fanfare. Over
the next few decades the university sold much of the collection
and permitted unrelated departments to occupy the building. The
museum eventually shuttered in 1945 for nine years of supposed
collections management. Prior to the 1954 reopening, spurred largely
by alumni, Stanford students and curators worked to restore some of
the fragmented items from the collection for display. Yet the museum
remained a “morgue of relics” dedicated to the Stanfords, according to
one curator in the early 1960s.
With the arrival of Lorenz Eitner in 1963 as chair of the Department
of Art and Architecture and unofficial museum director, the museum
updated its mission to one of research, teaching, and the production
of art historical scholarship. Almost three-quarters of the building still
lay in disrepair upon his arrival, but under his guidance, the collection
rebranded from the memorial museum into the Stanford University
Museum of Art. The “new” museum embraced its educational role first
and foremost.
But its rebirth was short-lived. On the afternoon of October 17, 1989,
the San Andreas fault shook again, even closer to Palo Alto than in
1906. The museum was among the 6 percent of campus buildings
condemned after the Loma Prieta earthquake. The collection
was spared from damage (save only five pieces), but the concrete
walls required extensive renovation. Interestingly, the cracks appeared
horizontally and vertically, rather than in a diagonal X shape
as engineers had expected. These unusual cracks were not new
deterioration but dated to the original structural damage from 1906.
The fault lines of the great earthquake still ran deep.
The university took advantage of the opportunity to renovate the
museum building. Another nine years of boarded-up doors resulted
in the current, expanded iteration of the museum, the Iris & B. Gerald
Cantor Center for Visual Arts. While its chief purpose remains
the production of art-based scholarship, a gallery dedicated to the
Stanford family lies at the core of the building.
46
47

Credits and Acknowledgments
Mark Dion’s project The Melancholy Museum: Love, Death, and Mourning at Stanford
is supported by the Diekman Family Contemporary Commissions Program. The
artist worked with students from Susan Dackerman and Paula Findlen’s winter
2019 course, which explored the history of the Stanford family collection. Anna
Toledano and Kate Holohan assisted in the course design and artifact selection.
We are grateful to the lenders to the exhibition: the Stanford Archaeology
Center, Stanford Special Collections, the Oakland Museum of California, and the
California Academy of Sciences. We also are indebted to our Stanford colleagues
Julie Cain, Daniel Hartwig, Christina J. Hodge, Laura Jones, Maggie Kimball,
Megan Rhodes Victor, and Emma Vossbrink. Thank you to Marc Bauer and his
team from Made for the Museum Co. for building and installing the casework.
Many thanks to our editor Lindsey Westbrook for her diligent edits and Benjamin
Shaykin for designing this guide. Finally, we are grateful to the Cantor Arts Center
team for their work on the project: Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Kenneth Becker,
Martins Bluzma, Peg Brady, Katherine Clifford, Catherine Coueignoux, Shanna
Dickson, Camille DuPlantier, Jeffrey Fairbairn, Julie Kamiyama, Dolores Kincaid,
Albert Lewis, Brooks Manbeck, Angela McGrew, Ashley McGrew, Daniel Meltsner,
Stefanie Midlock, Clarissa Morales, and Tiffany Sakato. The contributions of the
summer 2019 interns were likewise key: Kevin Chappelle, Cole Griffiths, and
Ekalan Hou. Curatorial assistant Liv Porte expertly guided the installation and
publication to completion.
Mark Dion would like to thank Tanya Bonakdar Gallery for their ongoing support.
© 2019, Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved. No part of
the contents of this book may be
published without the written
permission of the Iris & B. Gerald
Cantor Center for the Visual Arts
at Stanford University, 328 Lomita
Drive, Stanford, CA 94305.
Book design: Benjamin Shaykin
Copy editor: Lindsey Westbrook
Typeset in Lydia, Robinson, Atlas
Grotesk, and GT Alpina Typewriter
Printed by Oscar Printing Company
First edition 2019
2,000 copies printed
opposite: I. W. (Isaiah West) Taber (1830–1912), Leland Stanford Jr.’s
Toys and Museum Objects, n.d. Stanford University Archives
inside flap: Mark Dion (b. 1961), A preliminary sketch of a mourning
cabinet, influenced by the Victorian era for the exhibition The Melancholy
Museum: Love, Death, and Mourning at Stanford, 2018. Courtesy of the artist
back cover: Stuffed Owl in Frame, before 1882. Cantor Arts Center
48
Look deeper into the content
of The Melancholy Museum.
Point your phone camera at
the QR code and follow the
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Credits and Acknowledgments
Mark Dion’s project The Melancholy Museum: Love, Death, and Mourning at Stanford
is supported by the Diekman Family Contemporary Commissions Program. The
artist worked with students from Susan Dackerman and Paula Findlen’s winter
2019 course, which explored the history of the Stanford family collection. Anna
Toledano and Kate Holohan assisted in the course design and artifact selection.
We are grateful to the lenders to the exhibition: the Stanford Archaeology
Center, Stanford Special Collections, the Oakland Museum of California, and the
California Academy of Sciences. We also are indebted to our Stanford colleagues
Julie Cain, Daniel Hartwig, Christina J. Hodge, Laura Jones, Maggie Kimball,
Megan Rhodes Victor, and Emma Vossbrink. Thank you to Marc Bauer and his
team from Made for the Museum Co. for building and installing the casework.
Many thanks to our editor Lindsey Westbrook for her diligent edits and Benjamin
Shaykin for designing this guide. Finally, we are grateful to the Cantor Arts Center
team for their work on the project: Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Kenneth Becker,
Martins Bluzma, Peg Brady, Katherine Clifford, Catherine Coueignoux, Shanna
Dickson, Camille DuPlantier, Jeffrey Fairbairn, Julie Kamiyama, Dolores Kincaid,
Albert Lewis, Brooks Manbeck, Angela McGrew, Ashley McGrew, Daniel Meltsner,
Stefanie Midlock, Clarissa Morales, and Tiffany Sakato. The contributions of the
summer 2019 interns were likewise key: Kevin Chappelle, Cole Griffiths, and
Ekalan Hou. Curatorial assistant Liv Porte expertly guided the installation and
publication to completion.
Mark Dion would like to thank Tanya Bonakdar Gallery for their ongoing support.
© 2019, Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved. No part of
the contents of this book may be
published without the written
permission of the Iris & B. Gerald
Cantor Center for the Visual Arts
at Stanford University, 328 Lomita
Drive, Stanford, CA 94305.
Book design: Benjamin Shaykin
Copy editor: Lindsey Westbrook
Typeset in Lydia, Robinson, Atlas
Grotesk, and GT Alpina Typewriter
Printed by Oscar Printing Company
First edition 2019
2,000 copies printed
opposite: I. W. (Isaiah West) Taber (1830–1912), Leland Stanford Jr.’s
Toys and Museum Objects, n.d. Stanford University Archives
inside flap: Mark Dion (b. 1961), A preliminary sketch of a mourning
cabinet, influenced by the Victorian era for the exhibition The Melancholy
Museum: Love, Death, and Mourning at Stanford, 2018. Courtesy of the artist
back cover: Stuffed Owl in Frame, before 1882. Cantor Arts Center
48