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Emory University Archives
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Each year meant a little bit more of attraction for me for the Emory campus. The plantings originally for the campus as it was laid out, were rather interesting and certainly attractive. The driveway, for example, that came up from North Decatur Road -- then a single road, by the way, wound through woods and over the bridges and on out -- was bordered with flowering shrubs and some evergreens. During the springtime and even during the winter when some of the evergreen shrubs were still there showing their leaves, but during the summer particularly, the flowering shrubs were just gorgeous. To simply drive up that little roadway and enter the campus going through across those two rustic bridges which have stood the test of time for these many years, gave you the impression of going into a place of beauty.
It did not take me long as a biologist to begin to complain to the President (at that time President Harvey Cox) regarding the failure to preserve some of the beautiful things we had. It was not unusual to find somebody, for example, putting in a new telephone line or new light wire or something, to go through the woods and dig a hole and put down a post and there it was, destroying, of course, any of the shrubbery in its path. At one time some destruction of the plantings along that beautiful roadway took place, and I immediately went to the President and complained about it. He had enough on his hands to keep the University going at that time, because we were frequently put to to keep out of the red. Our ideal has been through all these years, as you all know, to keep the University in the black in order to establish good credit and in order to be really on sound financial basis. At any rate, after a few months of that sort of thing, he called me one day and said, "Look here, I am tired of you complaining about destruction of these trees and these shrubs and things of that sort here just to put in a path or roadway or something," and he said, "Now, listen, I can't take care of all that, but from now on, not a thing will be planted on this campus nor anything taken off the campus, not a tree will be cut nor a path laid out unless you o.k. it." Of course, there was the challenge, and it was either put up or shut up, and I said, "I will be glad to do it, Dr. Cox, in my spare time." He said, "Now, all these buildings around here need planting." At that time there were very few plantings around the buildings; the walkways were not very well established, and the general plan of the quadrangle leading between the law building and the theology building was not developed. The general plan was to have a slope going from the end of the campus up to the path between the two buildings and then running on through to any future buildings that might be built. When the Candler Library was built, it made an ideal finishing structure, you might say, to the quadrangle.
At that time there were only a few trees in the quadrangle itself, planted around the 1920's -- 1925 or so. Among the most interesting ones is the big holly that stands in the middle of the quadrangle, which was planted by Mrs. Warren Candler (Mrs. Bishop Candler) from a seedling that she brought from Wesley's oak down at Frederica. About the same time, she arranged to have these big pecan trees planted. I do not remember the exact dates, but about in the early 20's. At any rate, not only were those things planted and sort of spaced to give a kind of configuration, but a long pathway was planned from the entrance at the lower level straight through the quadrangle to go toward the Candler Library, and the plantings were balanced on each side of that big pathway. The most interesting of those were perhaps the two Japanese Magnolias, one on each side, and along with it several other shrubs that were appropriate for the border. Some of them, by the way, were rather rare. We were able to get some very interesting evergreens and had them paired and matched along that pathway. One of these had such an interesting descriptive name that I used it to illustrate nomenclature as biologists have developed it (sawara cypress). The initial or genus name is chamaecyparis, a member of the cypress family (chamai = dwarf, cyparis = cypress); the species name is pisifera -- indicating the type of cone scales present. Horticultural varieties have been developed, and additional names were added. The variety name indicated the thread-like leaf arrangement filifera. Another variety with variegated golden leaves added the term aureo-variegata. Our shrub then became chamaecyparis pisifera, var. filifera aureavariegata.
One of the magnolia trees is still standing, as you see from your trips up and down the quadrangle. The other was ruined when the Administration Building was built and so much grading had to be done. The tree died and had to be removed, along with many of the other shrubs. Some of those shrubs, particularly one of the photinias -- the great big shrub with which you are all familiar, that has those gorgeous reddish-looking leaves when they come out and then has a whole cluster of flowers in the spring followed by some berries, and many insects, of course, are attracted to it -- one or two of those we moved to other parts of the campus, and I think some of them are still living, perhaps up near the athletic field.
The entire plan of the campus was changed more or less when the new buildings began to be erected. As you know, the buildings were not placed according to any plan in those early days. It is said generally that some of the members of the Board of Trustees walked out and found a space and said, "All right, we will put the chemistry building here," and so the chemistry building was put there. Later on, the physics building had to be located, and they said, "All right, we will put that here."
The ditch or creek that runs between the old chemistry building and the geology and biology buildings was a free-running affair fed by springs located farther up on the hills. Along that creek were all sorts of wild things,in the way of plants and a good many wild animals, too. It was not unusual at all to find copperhead snakes crawling up toward the buildings from the general area of the creek between the two buildings. All the trees were well established, such as tulip poplars, oaks, hickories, dogwoods and so on. An attempt was made to border the walkway going down to the cabin from the upper area with wild things that were indigenous and make it even more attractive but leaving it as nearly as possible in its natural condition.
The buildings themselves had to be planted, and if you have watched horticultural designs in planting buildings of our type, you are aware of the problem. It is a difficult matter to get the right kind of shrubbery, to go in front as foundation plantings for these flat buildings with the red top roofs and pink marble. So it was difficult from the very beginning to select the right kind of plants. I selected some types of arborvitae being used at that time to go at the corners or frame the doors, but forgetting how big they grew and how ungainly they looked as they got older. We began to select the types of plants we thought would go well around these buildings, and we started planting them.
When the Candler Library was built, you can see what a problem someone had who was looking after the planting of the buildings. I planted a balanced planting on both sides of the building by the sides of the steps. We had three or four men on the whole campus to look after it, and when planting time came, I was given the use of those men and, of course, fertilizer and compost that we had around, and we planted things as they should have been planted. In a few months or maybe years after those plantings were made in front of the library, the ones on the left side as you approach the library began to die. The ones on the right side thrived luxuriantly. The plantings were the same, and we used plants suitable for the purpose. At any rate, I began to investigate, and after it got worse on one side of the building, we just decided to plant the whole thing over. Dr. Cox had set aside the munificent sum of $250 a year for me to spend for the plants for the buildings and surroundings. When we started our second year of planting those that had done so poorly at the library, I found the reason. A steam line ran along in front of the building on the left side as you look at it. That soil was dried out and was in no condition for promoting plant growth. Of course, as soon as we found that out, we changed the conditions of the soil when we put the stuff in to prevent its possible drying out. The other side, however, had the sewer line running from the steps at the entrance on down to the sewer line at the foot of the hill. That sewer line was made out of rough tiling -- rough joints, you remember, and those joints had leaked a little bit, and all those plants were just going to town. They were sending their roots down near the joints of the sewer line and getting more nourishment than they could use. All that has been adjusted now, and we try to keep it balanced. I might say at this point that the museum in the early days had been placed in the library, the room leading toward the left as you go in. Mr. Fattig, who was in charge of the museum, had decided it would be a very excellent thing to have a group of live snakes in the museum collection to entertain the youngsters that came and to study the snakes on the campus. So he built a number of cages and put them right near the window and put copperheads and some rattlers and a few other snakes from the neighborhood in those cages. Every morning he would go in and clean the cages and just dump the water on that planting strip. Ms. Jemison, who was in charge of the library at the time, never liked to have the museum over there and particularly never liked to have Mr. Fattig's snakes and live bees and things of that sort. When I went to investigate the failure of the plants on that side of the library, she immediately came and said, "I know exactly what's happened to those shrubs, Dr. Baker." I said, "What is that?" She said, "Mr. Fattig has emptied those snake cages every day and poured that material out of the window on the shrubs. Of course, it will kill them." Well, that did not make sense, of course, and I had to investigate a little bit farther. It shows, though, how many people on campus were interested in all the things that went on regarding the planting.
As time went on, the matter of taking care of the shrubs that had been planted around the buildings became quite a problem. We had only three or four men in the crew to look after the entire campus, and that kept them pretty busy. They had no trucks and cars for hauling. As I recall, we had one old mule hitched to a wagon, and that was our source of transportation of our materials and our fertilizers and our dead leaves and things of that sort. So it was really quite disadvantageous to look after everything under those circumstances. Finally, it became such a problem to take care of these shrubs that people began to call from the different buildings -- I recall particularly around the hospital -- asking if we couldn't come up or send somebody up to prune the shrubs, they were growing up somewhat out of shape and so on. Well, that, of course, brought on complications, and yet we had to do the best we could under the circumstances.
One interesting thing about the quadrangle comes to mind. When the original grass was planted, apparently the soil had been taken from a Bermuda patch in an old field somewhere, put out in rows and layers in the open space. In the course of a few months, or a few years as a matter of fact, the entire quadrangle was just one big sea of wild onions. You couldn't spray at that time; it was entirely too expensive and besides there were no really worthwhile sprays yet invented to take care of the wild onion growth. So Neal Smith, who was in charge of all the operations of the physical plant, said, "All right, what will we do then?" I said, "I don't know of any way to get rid of them except to dig them up." We got a group of students to agree to come out and help eradicate the onions. So taking the group of three workmen and a group of volunteer students, and with a series of small very strong trowels welded onto a long handle so that a student or person could stand at the top of that handle and press down with his foot under the onions and dig them up, we had two or three interesting sessions of digging those onions. We got them all up. Of course, it made a knotty looking campus, but that could be corrected. We piled all those onions down near the old station, and as I recall, it must have been a pile fifteen or twenty feet high. That, of course, made an excellent compost pile of rich material as time went on and the onions decayed and rotted and the soil became fertile. Then began the planting of the campus in some kind of decent grass.
The first suggestion made about the quadrangle was to have a nice borderline of ivy or some sort of decorative side plants along the walks. That proved almost too expensive to keep up, the idea being at that time not to plant anything on campus that required a great deal of time to take care of, because if you did, you would spend more to take care of it than you did to put it in originally. We planned several different things to beautify the campus and put in the plantings. Mr. George Mew, who was treasurer at the time, was very much interested in all that sort of thing and worked very closely with me in all sorts of things. At one time he got a gift of all the shrubs and trees that grew in one of the big nurseries, one owned by the Nunallys here in Atlanta out some few miles from the campus. We arranged to get all those shrubs in to the campus. At that time the greenhouse had been put there on the area of the pecan forest where buildings are now erected, and since the Biology Department was at that time in the physiology building, it was a very convenient place to have the greenhouse. We decided to beautify all of the area.
We prepared the soil for the long stretch of campus from the greenhouse down to the railroad track or down to the roadway by the railroad and put the plants in, We then planted a good many things around the greenhouse, and it was really quite a little showplace, Later the Biology Department was moved up to the chemistry building, and the greenhouse was no longer serviceable to us.
Next we planned a nice little landscaping project running from the greenhouse down to the foot of the hill where there was a good place for a pond or lake. We decided we would make some waterfalls and plant waterlilies where the ponds were. This became an expensive project, and when we found we would have to move from up there and use the land for something else, we gave up the idea.
By that time we had had a very interesting contribution from Mr. J. Adger Stewart of Louisville, Kentucky, about 1937. He gave us a collection of hollies and an endowment to take care of them when planted on the campus. The endowment is still being used, and at the time it gave us a new impetus for a certain type of planting. Mr. Stewart, from '37 to '43 or '44, purchased every year all the different kinds of hollies that he could find in the nurseries in the country and shipped them down for introduction to the campus. At that time we decided that hollies would be the ideal thing to use as foundation plants around the buildings. Glenn Memorial Church School building had just been completed about that time and an amphitheatre placed between the building and the church. I planted a hedge of Burfordi hollies facing the little platform, with speaker's stand, in front of the amphitheatre. They did excellently. Then we began to plant hollies as foundation plants around the buildings and they, too, did very well. You still see some of them around. We later planted a whole row of the hollies on the roadway leading into the campus in front of Glenn Memorial Church. The holly idea was excellent, and we did replace a good many of the boxwoods that we had originally started with around the buildings. We found that those were not satisfactory because each winter we had not only to keep the boxwoods growing and looking nice but we also had the difficulty of carrying them through the winter without injury.
One of the most attractive portions in the general area of the campus, particularly for a stranger visiting it for the first time, are our beautiful pine trees. They stood in every direction around through the ravines and behind the buildings and made a sort of background frame for the whole picture of the quadrangle. When we were seeking some Rockefeller money to develop the campus and help with our general programs, I happened to be seated next to one of the Rockefeller brothers at a dinner. During the time he found out that I was interested in beautifying the campus, and one of his suggestions over and over again was, "Whatever you do, don't ruin your pine trees; that's the most beautiful part of the campus." So for years we maintained sort of a frame for the whole picture with our gigantic pine trees. Of course, there were some difficulties involved in that. Many of the older pines have been here long enough to stand almost anything, but many of the younger pines growing around on the edges were not accustomed to hard winters. About 1935 when we had the tremendous ice storm, the campus looked like a wreck. The young trees were bent down almost to the ground; many of the old trees had limbs broken off and so on, and the whole thing looked like a hopeless mess. Mr. Candler called me and said, "What can we do about that campus?" I said, "Well, Mr. Candler, we will just have to clean it up, but I don't have any expert tree men out here that can do it." He said, "All right, get the Davey people to come out and send you some experts, and you get a group of the students and see if you can't work through that thing and sort of clean it up." So one of the memorable experiences, as far as I am concerned, about the care of the campus was when we put those students under the training direction of some of the Davey tree people, and later sent them with their big ropes to the tops of the trees, to cut off the limbs, shape them up, and do all kind of things necessary in an expert manner. We got it cleaned up pretty well, and yet you see all over the campus some of the older pine trees with large wounds that have been healed through the years where the limbs were cut off to keep them in shape. Of course, through the years several of those trees have had to give way to buildings and so on, and we no longer have the beautiful screen of pine trees that was so attractive.
The work in keeping the campus up became increasingly burdensome, and we finally got hold of a landscape man to look after the whole thing. He came and really contributed a great deal, but always under the supervision of the Biology Department. The quadrangle was kept relatively free of any trees, simply because the pine trees behind the buildings gave such a beautiful general appearance. Later on, we found that we had to have some improvement on the area behind the hospital, the first wing of the hospital that was built. There was a big area in there of just native trees and shrubs, and I had put in a good many azaleas and dogwoods and other shrubs that would be interesting. Finally, it became necessary to get some more parking space. So someone designed or suggested the idea of cutting all the trees behind the hospital wing and putting in a parking lot. Dr. Cox called me to his office and said, "Here is a plan that's been proposed to take care of that area behind the hospital. I want you to look at it." So I looked at it, and he said, "Isn't there some way that we can save most of those trees and shrubs and still get in a lot of parking places?" I said, "Well, it looks like it could be done." So he said, "Go out there and put a string around any tree that can be cut without injuring the general effect, and we'll put in what parking places we can." So I went out and, sure enough, we did find that we could put in a large number of cars by arranging the slots for the cars and not lose so many of the trees. For years that was then one of the beauty spots as you looked out of the hospital windows. Later, of course, the new wing had to be built and all that area was completely despoiled for parking places. That just goes along with progress, of course.
One place was very advantageous as far as our holly trees were concerned. One of the ideas of planting hollies was not only to use them for foundation plantings around the buildings, but also to have a collection of specimen plants distributed all over the campus so people could see the different kinds of hollies growing as well as possible. We placed individual holly trees in strategic places and some of them are still there, but the only place that has been left untouched is that area immediately behind the Candler Library. So far as we could tell in that time, it would be a long long time before any of that planting there would be disturbed. So I planted quite a collection of some of our hollies in the area. Looking at them now from the windows of the wing on that side of the hospital, they are things of beauty both in daytime and night. There we have several that are noted on the list of hollies that I am giving to you. We planted a number of others all over the campus, some of them very rare. But when we had to widen Clifton Road, we lost one of the most beautiful of the English hollies, one with variegated leaves. We tried to save it by transplanting it a few years ago when we opened Clifton Road, but it did not succeed. You can't transplant one of the larger hollies without a great deal of difficulty, and many times you can't save them because of the disturbance of their roots as adjusted to their leaves. When the museum was in the basement of Bishops Hall, I planted several specimen hollies in that area which has been pretty well taken care of, and I don't anticipate anything coming into that place.
We had another big area down below where the new chemistry building is. It was just more or less wild, so we decided it would be a good place there to put in a whole pine grove since pines were some of our most interesting individual plants. Maybe some of you remember that we cleared all that off and put those pine trees down there in rows so that you could have a good clear vista throughout them. Dr. Sterling Brinkley provided the young trees. Really, it made a beautiful sort of adjunct to the campus and took away some of the odds and ends of an unplanted and uncared-for area. Of course, when we had to have a building, though, we had to get rid of most of them. So it has been ever since we started in the development of the campus. I have had nothing to do with all of that except, as I say, sitting in a sort of advisory and critical capacity.
One area that I intend to save if at all possible is the ravine immediately behind the old law building. That's the only untouched area that we have left. It's a natural beech forest, and really represents the culmination of the growth of materials, undercover plants as well as the tall plants. You can't build a beech forest like that in under a hundred years because of the necessity of having a certain kind of fungus in the soil which the roots of the beech must have in order to grow and do well. The little stream that goes down through that ravine was beautifully fed by springs up above, and on one occasion we planted rhododendrons up where the new nurses' home is, and where some of those buildings have been put in. At that time, we had, I guess, a hundred or more rhododendrons of different types, along with our azaleas, planted along the edge of the ravine. Then coming on down that ravine the little creek had good fresh water in it and the springs still fed the area. We planted then on down from there clear to the end of the car line before the new roadway behind the law building was built. On that I put in rhododendrons, too. I got at one time, as I recall, 125 rhododendrons of a certain kind and planted a big section not very far from where the Administration Building is now. The difficulty was that as people came up from the car line toward the hospital, it wasn't unusual at all during the blooming season of those rhododendrons to have them cut off a bunch of flowers and take to the hospital. The little low place down at the entrance to the campus across from the Village was just a little marshy place and the water ran down pretty freely, so I planted a good number of the hollies that grow naturally in swampy places in there. Again, progress demanded that we change the drainage system as we built new roads and changed the whole aspect of the campus, and so most of those are gone.
In the early days, none of you remember, I am pretty sure, the fact that we had the Marie Antoinette Gardens, as we called them, down in the ravine at the end of the Administration Building. Now, before that road was filled in there with fill dirt to make it a broad road and parking places and so on, the whole ravine was just naturally laid out as a sort of garden. So we put in terraces, and at certain times placed chairs and had outdoor entertainment meetings there. Some of you may remember that, but of course that had to go away as time went on.
Then, I began to plant ferns and natural plants all down the ravine on the side there, and so far as I know now there are only two big rhododendrons that I put out there some fifty years ago at the bottom of the hill. They are doing well and bloom nearly every year, but it is a difficult matter to keep the ivy and so on out of them, to keep them from being destroyed. All the smaller items nearly that were planted along the creek in order to get the benefit of the creek water, most of them have been destroyed or have died because of the foul nature of that creek water.
We had some interesting experiences in those days, and one of the problems came as the result of our planting the quadrangle beautifully as a lawn because we had the frame of trees all around. Then the question came up as to why we had such a bare-looking campus, and the suggestions were made that we ought to plant trees out there and give it a sort of a finished look instead of having just an open space like a pasture. One of the members very interested in the campus from the outside kept worrying about that thing looking like a cow pasture to him. So we got together a committee, I had very little to do with that, incidentally, except on the sidelines, and we planted those oaks and the maples that are gorgeous at certain seasons of the year. But the difficulty of planting such things as the maples in that kind of conspicuous place is that are really short-lived in a way as compared with the big pecan trees and the pines, and so it not going to be long until those limbs begin to die and fall off and we will have a problem of replanting something in their places. The oaks are fine, they last a long long time. We have two or three different kinds of oaks on the quadrangle. As I mentioned before, the first magnolia that we planted on the campus is the one that stands now as a pretty good-sized tree near the old theology building. We put that out because there was a nice space there and a nice little specimen plant would look good, and we began thinking then about bordering the campus with native magnolias. The idea was to take the Clifton Road area and put a string of magnolias from one end to the other, and then come onto the campus and put them at strategic places. Well, the war came on and times got hard, and we had to give up any idea of planting. Then, of course, we realized that if traffic continued as it had started, we wouldn't have a big enough and broad enough road out there to save those magnolias in case they were at their prime. We did later on, with the suggestion made to Mr. Ruppersburg and others who had preceded him, plant magnolias at strategic positions as you come into the campus. But we have had to get rid of some of those as time has gone on, in order to widen the road and put in more parking spaces and things of that sort.
I have no idea what the future will hold for the campus, and I doubt seriously if we can hope to save very much of it in native condition other than the ravine, but I do want us to save that. You have done a good job in putting groups of shrubs of certain kinds at strategic places, and you will see some of our oldest hollies at prominent spots as you drive into the campus. All of these, however, ought to be labeled with a permanent label. We have most of the hollies, or did have several years ago when I made photographs of all the hollies, marked with a little aluminum tag on them. But what they need is a permanent label. We tried labeling some of them with more permanent tags. The big holly in the middle of the campus, for example, we labeled with a copper plate or bronze plaque. Well, you cannot put copper labels on trees like that or any other place without the price of copper influencing somebody to take the tags off and sell them for the copper. The only way I know of to do it is to sink a good concrete post at some of these strategic places and put on a good zinc label outlined with acid so that the label will stand. The concrete post will be of such little value that I think it will hold up.
As part of the long-range planting years ago, we thought the long stretch of Peachtree Creek down through the woods and going on into the area where Wesley Woods now stands, would be a good place for starting a botanical garden and arboretum. So, with Dr. Cox's acquiescence, I got the National Forestry Association interested in it. They came out, and we looked the whole thing over and made a list of trees that we could plant there that would be of long life and would be interesting specimens. Of course, as I said a moment ago, many of our plans for particular developments had to go awry because we ran into a depression. That was the time somebody had offered us a biology building. We were just all set up, and Dr. Lester and I drew plans for a combination geology and biology building to go down in about the place where they are now. We planned them as a single big complex so that we could combine the two departments pretty well since they are closely related. We also planned a nice room for a good museum since geology and biology are primarily museum agencies. We got the message then as the war went on that it was impossible for us to get the money to build a building, so that had to be called off. It was several years, then, until we got a little building that we could call biology, and now we have outgrown that.
In the future, I do think we could have a few individual trees planted, such as, for example, ginkgo trees. Ginkgo trees are among the oldest living specimens on the earth. They go back over a hundred million years and are very interesting trees. I got a chance to buy five of those trees from a nursery in South Georgia, in LaGrange as I recall, and I brought them all to the campus and put three of them out in the open space where the old chemistry building was. One of them is still there, but two that I put there died because of the steam lines and the structural injury when they were revamping that building. Then we planted several ginkgo trees around over the campus at different places. They always create a good deal of admiration in their fall beauty. Whether those trees or others should be put out as individual memorials for somebody or only as specimen trees is a question. You must be careful where you plant single trees and why you put them in a certain place, and you must be pretty well assured they will stand there unless we have need for a new building where they are planted.
Actually, Fernbank was offered to the University years ago when we got into trouble with that area during the war period and the depression that went along with it. All that property was purchased after much work on many of our parts in order to get the land for use as a natural museum and botanical garden and so on. I worked diligently with that project, going to the different garden clubs and civic clubs around the city to spread the news of a possible botanical garden in this area. Finally the property was bought, but because of the necessity of funds to take care of it after we got it, it became quite a problem. At one time it was offered to the University lock, stock and barrel, just as bare land more or less, with some development on it. I remember going to some of the Board of Trustees -- Mr. Thompson was secretary at that time -- and I said, "You know, I believe we ought to have that land, Mr. Thompson; I don't think we need to develop it now and I don't think we need to spend any money on it now, but we ought to have it for future development for Emory." He said, "Why, doctor, we are land poor right now." And we were, we had all that land across the creek up there where CDC is.and where much of that development has gone on, and we had all that land where the WAGA is located, and it did look like we had an unlimited amount of land. But now, it is a different proposition and, fortunately, the Fernbank project has turned out very nicely. Incidentally, Mr. James Mackay and my boy, W. B., Jr., were very good friends when they were in school. Jamie assisted my boy in taking projectors and equipment to different places for me as I tried to describe Fernbank with slides and pictures and sell the idea to the community. He became very much interested in it. Bread cast on the waters sometimes comes back. When Jamie got to the Congress and was in a place where he could get funds for certain projects in his district, he was able to get enough funds to develop Fernbank as it was originally dreamed. It is now getting to be one of the well-known museum and laboratories in the whole country. Emory, of course, has full use of it, and we work in close cooperation with their staff. I do not know that we will ever have the same kind of opportunity as we had at that time to develop a garden, an arboretum, a forest preserve and so on.
As I have said before, the one interest that I now have is primarily in the ravine below the old law building running from the entrance up to the new Woodruff Library. I do think that should be preserved and should be beautified in any way possible, but primarily having it cleaned up so that there will be no trash and rubbish collected. We should plant many things that will grow in that particular area and make it a beauty spot for visitors who come in, and particularly for those who cross the rustic bridges and can see the ravine from each direction. I hope that we can save the area and not let some development come in that will take it away from the main camp us. I do foresee the possibility that the beech woods, a natural beech wood forest, together with the wild magnolias, the azaleas, the sweet shrubs, the dogwood, and all of the other shrubs that may be planted later could be destroyed unless provision is made for their preservation. I hope the committee will agree with such a plan and see to it that the ravine is set aside in perpetuity as one of the natural areas of the campus and giving it sort of bird's eye view of what it was in the old days. It can be made a beauty spot, I am sure.
Another area that might well be considered for development later is the entire planting around the President's Home on Lullwater. Dr. Atwood was very much interested in that sort of project and suggested while he was here that we organize a committee from the public named Campus Development Committee. That seemed impractical at the time because of the fact that we had Friends of the Library, we had friends of this and friends of that, and it seemed to me we were not in position where we could present a composite picture to the public of plans for the campus. That might be considered as one of the later developments. If we do find it advantageous to go to work and work more on the plantings around Lullwater House and in the grounds, there would be, of course, the necessity of making a permanent plan and trying to carry it out. It would be quite a showplace and would be, in perpetuity perhaps, something worth having. That, of course, is something for the committee to decide.
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