Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/481

LATER BUILDINGS OF THE FIRST QUARTER-CENTURY 423 questions submitted to it with great care and prepared an elabo- rate printed report which was approved by the Trustees and adopted September 16, 1902. In accordance with the recommendations the library building, when erected, was to stand on the spot where later the Harper Memorial Library was built. It was to form the center of a group of nine buildings, which should include, in addi- tion to Haskell Oriental Museum already built, those for the Divinity School, the Classical departments, History, Social Science, Philosophy, and the Law School. Tentative plans for all the buildings of the Library Group as thus planned were drawn in connection with the preparation of the report of the Commission. Those of the library building itself were repeatedly restudied by the archi- tects, Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, in the next six years and submitted for criticism, not only to the Board of Trustees, but to many of the librarians of the country. Thus writes the chairman of the Commission, later Director of the University Libraries, Professor Ernest D. Burton. President Harper in his Decennial Report issued in 1902 refers at length to the work of the Library Commission and says : The building for which there is the greatest need is the Library. On this point the entire membership of the University faculties agrees The greatest assistance that could be rendered the University would be the provision of such a building. This profound conviction of President Harper as to the urgent need of a library building for the best development of the Uni- versity was well known to the Founder, the Trustees, the pro- fessors, and friends of the institution. On his death in January, 1906, therefore, there was a very general feeling that this building, so much desired by him, must be erected as a special memorial of the University's first President. Perhaps the first formal expression of this general feeling was contained in a telegram to Mr. Ryerson from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., dated January 16, 1906, ten days after the President's death, saying: If the Trustees favor the erection of a University Library in memory of Dr. Harper, my father will join with the Doctor's many friends in Chicago and the East in a contribution toward it.