Kirkland House boasts one of the most distinguished histories amongst the Houses of Harvard College, for the Main Courtyard of Kirkland – with its procession of Edwardian formal rooms and Oxbridge entry-ways – may rightly be regarded as an architectural prototype from which the later House idiom was derived. Smith Halls, which enclose the main Courtyard, were constructed in 1914 as freshman dormitories and pre-date the House system by some fifteen years. They were designed by Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge, and named for their donor, George Smith (A.B. 1853) of St. Louis, and his personal benefactors, James and Persis Smith, who raised him as a boy.

While the creation of a House system emulating the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge had long been a dream of President Lowell (1909-33) – as evidenced by his conscious structuring of Smith Halls upon Oxbridge paradigms – it was not until 1929, through the munificent bequest of Edward S. Harkness, that Lowell’s vision was realized on a grand scale. Charles Wager in Harvard: Four Centuries and Freedom, notes that Lowell had publicly espoused the notion of a House system as early as 1907. In a speech at – of all places – Yale University, Lowell noted:

In a small college the individual is in less danger of being lost; the young man without aggressive personality is less likely to be ignored or submerged. Character and self-reliance are more developed by being a man of mark in Ravenna than by belonging to the mob in Rome…

Harkness – an alumnus of Yale University and a major philanthropist of secondary and tertiary education – had previously offered to finance the construction of just such a collegiate system for his own Alma Mater. Yet Yale had hesitated, unsure as to how such a system would be reconciled with Yale College. Harkness, who “had never heard of tardiness with proffered millions,” was irritated. Accordingly, he turned to Harvard and President Lowell, with whom he enjoyed cordial relations: he offered an immediate endowment of $3,000,000 which, upon further warm conversation and planning, ballooned to over $13,000,000 for the creation of seven “colleges.”

Within four years, seven Houses were completed through new construction and the conversion of seminal structures, like Smith Halls. With the completion of the Hicks House renovation and the construction of the two original Bryan Hall entries (J and N) and the Masters’ Lodgings in 1931, Kirkland House was established. Bryan Hall was named for George Seeley Bryan (A.B. 1890), a Bridgeport industrialist who donated the money for its construction. After the House’s establishment, K, L and M entries were added to complete Bryan Hall in 1933. The architectural style is a collegiate form of Georgian Revival and incorporates authentic 18th-Century themes and designs; traces of this authenticity are found everywhere, for example in the boot-scrapers outside the entries and in the closet boot racks. Kirkland House was renovated most recently in 1984. 

From an architectural perspective, the understated and unpretentious scale of the Kirkland courts – coupled with their rich limestone quoining, decorate ironwork, carved pediments and deeply-recessed entry arches – are by far the most in keeping at Harvard with the Oxbridge idiom. Smith Halls – which appear deceptively unassuming – exhibit a sophisticated compositional subtlety which belies their Gilded Age genesis. No two faces of the Main Courtyard, for example, are the same – either in massing or in ornament. Designed in 1913 by the Boston-based architectural firm of Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch & Abbott (who later designed the other original Houses), Smith Halls are the only buildings amongst the River Houses to incorporate the twin-chimneyed gable treatment found in the archetypal example of Harvard architecture, Massachusetts Hall. And while Kirkland House is clearly indebted to this early eighteenth-century work, other Houses are likewise indebted to Kirkland; for Kirkland’s gilded cupola later served as the prototype for its turquoise next-door neighbor. The magnificent English Baroque-Revival overmantle and Corinthian paneling in Kirkland’s Junior Common Room, the richly understated Ionic order and Chippendale fretwork in the Dining Hall, and the mouldings and architectural detailings of the residential suites themselves exhibit an attention to detail, and lavishness of execution, to be nowhere else at Harvard on such a remarkable scale. 

During the past half-century, the Masters of Kirkland House have been: Edward A. Whitney (1930-35), Walter E. Clark (1935-45), Mason Hammond (1945-55), Charles H. Taylor (1955-65), Arthur Smithies (1965-74), Evon Z. and Catherine C. Vogt (1974-82), Donald H. and Cathleen K. Pfister (1982-2000), Tom and Verena Conley (2000-Present). Catherine Vogt and Donald and Cathleen Pfister are still members of the Senior Common Room. To learn more about Tom and Verena Conley, please click here.

John Thornton Kirkland

The Reverend Doctor John Thorton Kirkland, who served as President of Harvard University from 1810-1828, was characterized by Charles Wagner as “liberal in the faith, yet endowed with the blessings of active imaginative and coercive liberal enterprise.” Kirkland was the first in a line of “giants” who served as President of Harvard and whose collective vision helped realize the modern University. As President during Harvard’s “Augustan Age,” Kirkland is most significantly noted for his “democratization” of the University and his concerted efforts to neutralize Harvard’s stigma as a college which embraced only the wealthy and privileged. Kirkland devised and instituted an early system of “work study” through which freshmen of limited financial means might pursue bachelor’s degrees. Such students were given jobs as bell-ringers, “tutor’s freshmen”or (for the most lucky) “President’s Freshmen”- students who worked in the President’s own home as a means of financing their own education. Some notable Harvard alumni, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, served as “President’s Freshmen.”

President Kirkland widened the geographic pools of matriculants (as noted by Oliver Wendell Holmes), thus transforming Harvard from a sleepy New England school into a genuinely national college. Kirkland’s liberal academic and social reforms, however, garnered condemnation from the more conservative Calvinists of his day. Kirkland was widely loved by the undergraduates, not only for the pastoral attention he lavished upon them, but also for the practical and generous financial assistance he offered. Kirkland laid the foundation for the future strength of the schools of Medicine and Law and, as noted by Bainbridge Bunting, he

was the first president to attempt to break with the classical education that had remained almost unchanged since Harvard’s founding. He liberalized the curriculum, including the introduction of modern languages, and established two professional schools (law and divinity). He more than doubled the size of the faculty (creating 15 new professorships for a total of 25) and increased faculty salaries. He also moved the college in the direction of graduate work, establishing the status of Resident Graduate, in which a student with a B.A. could attend lectures and use the library. This was one of the reforms opposed by the faculty, however, and real graduate study at Harvard had to await the arrival of President Eliot in 1896.

Bunting also notes that Kirkland was as much a builder as he was a reformer. He improved Harvard Yard through the planting of elms, the laying-down of paths and –interestingly – by formally prohibiting residents of the Yard from throwing their daily refuse out their windows. He sponsored the erection of Holworthy, University and Divinity Halls, and made other significant improvements to Harvard’s overall physical infrastructure.

The limestone Cenotaph of President Kirkland is located atop the highest point of Harvard Hill in Mt. Auburn Cemetery. President Kirkland’s remains are interred in the Cabot family vault, located elsewhere in the cemetery. Mt. Auburn is but a short bus ride from Kirkland House; it is the final resting place of many American luminaries, is widely noted for its magnificent plantings and funerary monuments, and helped inspire the American public park system.

Hicks House Library History

With Hicks House as its library, Kirkland House is one of very few Harvard structures with ties to pre-Revolutionary colonial history. It was built in 1762 at the corner of the present Dunster and Winthrop streets by John Hicks, a successful Cambridge carpenter and contractor whose family had lived in the area since 1652. Both of Hick’s sons would attend Harvard. Appointed tax collector for Cambridge in 1771, Hicks was sympathetic to the revolutionary cause; he fell behind in his remittances, was tried in 1773, and his property was declared forfeit by the Crown. During this period, Hicks put his revolutionary sympathies into effect (though one of his sons, the publisher of the Massachusetts Gazette, was an equally ardent Tory). He participated in the Boston Tea Party in December 1773, and less than two years later on April 19, 1775 – upon hearing that the British were withdrawing from Concord through North Cambridge – Hicks joined a small band of snipers near the corner of the present Massachusetts and Rindge Avenues. Hicks was gunned down in a British volley that day and his body was interred in the Old Burying Ground across from Massachusetts Hall, one of several Yard dormitories used to house Continental soldiers during the war.

While the revolutionary army occupied Cambridge in 1775-76, Generals George Washington and Israel Putnam commandeered Hicks House to quarter junior officers and store supplies. After the war, the house passed through many owners’ hands and was frequently rented to students during the 19th century. In 1880, the house became the showplace for the antiques of Edith Stanton Frazier. Despite the late 19th-century development of the “Gold Coast” dormitories along Mt. Auburn Street (of which Claverly Hall and Adams House are now comprised), the area around Hicks House remained largely undeveloped except for a few student clubs. In large part, this was on account of the area’s proximity to the Charles River tidal marshes. The Charles remained a tidal river until it was dammed in 1910, and until that date, the marshes reached to within 100 feet of South Street. The drainage system of the MAC Quad (or lack thereof) on a rainy day serves as an occasional reminder of the land’s original characteristics.

From 1917 to 1922, Hicks House served as a noviatiate for the Episcopal monastic order of St. John the Evangelist – otherwise known as the Cowley Fathers (who are now situated along the Charles River, just west of JFK Park, in an imposing monastery designed by Ralph Adams Cram). After cooperating in restoration efforts in the early 1920’s – which Bainbridge Bunting notes “represents Harvard’s first effort to preserve an early Cambridge building other than its own” – the University purchased Hicks House in 1926, then decided to raze it two years later in order to build the Indoor Athletic Building (now the Malken Athletic Center). Fortunately, a funding appeal saved the structure, and by 1930 it was moved to its present location at the corner of South and JFK Streets. When Kirkland House was opened in 1931, Hicks House became its library, able to accommodate some 12,000 volumes. With the exception of Adams House (in which Apthorp House – the Masters’ Residence – is incorporated) Kirkland is the only Harvard House which boasts genuine colonial architecture as part of its overall fabric.

In October of 1931, Hicks House was selected as the repository for the Teddy Roosevelt Collection, a special collection of books donated to Kirkland by the Roosevelt Memorial Association. The Collection – a duplication of the President’s personal library housed at Sagamore Hill – contained approximately 100 volumes from the President’s original collection and duplicates of the remainder. Included in the bequest was a complete collection of Punch. Hicks House possessed many rare volumes (most of which have been subsequently transferred to the Houghton Library),including a copy of John Hall Stevenson’s Crazy Tales (of which there were believed to be only three copies in the United States) and several early editions, including Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, and Sit Walter Raleigh’s History of the World.

Kirkland House Coat of Arms

John Thornton Kirkland, President of Harvard from 1810-1828, used no coat of arms himself, nor can it be determined from which, if any, of several armigerous families of that name he descended. When, therefore, on the opening of Kirkland House in 1931, Pierre de Chaignon la Rose (A.B. Harvard 1895) was asked to design for it a coat of arms, he created a new composition, derived from sources connected to the name Kirkland but not infringing on any of the coats which suggested it. The name Kirkland originated in the Diocese of Carlisle and suggests that its first bearers were tenants of ecclesiastical lands. The arms of that diocese are a black cross on a silver field, the cross having on it a gold mitre. Moreover, the various arms of the several armigerous Kirkland families, while differing in detail, show as a common feature three silver stars called mullets or molest. Thus, in Mr. la Rose’s design, the field of Harvard gules (red) appropriately refers to the University. The black (sable) cross edged with silver (argent) comes from the arms of Carlisle. The three silver stars or mullets placed (charged) on the cross instead of the original mitre are found in the various Kirkland coats. The coat of arms of Kirkland House is described in heraldic terminology as: gules, on a cross salbe edged with silver three mullets argent. There is neither crest nor motto.

In the spring of 1955, the Meriden Gravure Company made, by off-set and silk screen process, 500 reproductions of Mr. la Rose’s original design for the arms of Kirkland House.