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Caption: Book - History of the University (Powell)
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University Organizes 281 sadly in need of improvement. The building was unsuitable in many respects, the campus was a desolation for wandering cattle and pigs. Judge Cunningham has written a description of the appearance of the new university which is in rather strong contrast to the glowing accounts given out by local papers when the county was seeking the location. ''The building and grounds in which our people hoped to house the new university, a five-story structure, with a four-story ell on the south, stood alone out on the bare prairie, unfenced, towering high above anything in either town, and very conspicuous for miles away. It occupied ground equal to two squares of the ordinary size. The line of White Street in Champaign and West Main in Urbana extended, was its south line while on the west side Wright Street, as then laid, occupied fifty-two feet of what is now the west side of the north campus, or the athletic park. The entrance to the front, the north side of the building, was at the natural grade line of the ground, with no outside steps, and the building had an appearance suggesting that, as a stake, it had been driven into the ground/ From the entrance at the north front, stairs began which led from story to story until the upper or fifth had been reached. In the front portion of the building, which was 125 feet in leKgth from east to west, were rooms to be used for recitation rooms and dormitories, while in the wing were more recitation rooms with kitchen and dining room, and a chapel in the fourth story, the original design having been to prepare for the conduct of a boarding school. No bush or shrub had ever grown upon that bare piece of prairie. What was known as the * Griggs F a r m / part of the donation of 400 acres to the State, lay away to the southeast two and onehalf miles from the building and grounds; the Busey Farm of 420 acres was a little over a mile to the south; while the 160 acres farm commonly called the ^experimental farm', was a little over a half a mile south, with a forty acre tract, half a mile long between. Some of the trustees questioned whether the latter farm was in fact'adjacent' to the buildings and grounds." 16 The board then at the May meeting decided to build a fence around the "white elephant," put a portico on it, rearrange '•Cunningham manuscripts.
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