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{shortcode-dd08abb0bb2b02bf4881baaa9fb305566107f8d4}he John Harvard statue is the crown jewel of the Harvard Yard. Ask any freshman about the crowds that throng the statue, and they’ll confirm that the monument’s fame reaches far and wide.
But the statue hasn’t always stood in its central location in front of University Hall.
Instead, it sat placidly outside Memorial Hall, in what would now be part of the Science Center Plaza, for 40 years. Only in 1924 — after a years-long campaign involving the statue’s sculptor Daniel C. French — was the monument moved to its present watch place in Harvard Yard.
Sculpted in 1884, the statue depicts an idealized version of the University’s first major donor (that’s no problem — as the 1884 edition of The Crimson reminds us, “the Latin ‘simulac[r]a’ does not always distinguish between real and ideal, true and false images”). French, the sculptor, would later become well known for his work on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
And the monument was originally placed before Memorial Hall, the distinctive structure that today houses Annenberg Hall, the freshman dining hall. The vast building — a monument in itself — had been completed just a few years earlier, in 1877, and a ceremony for the statue’s unveiling was held in its Sanders Theater.
But French wasn’t satisfied. Decades later, in 1920, the sculptor wrote to Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, unhappy that the statue’s current location in front of Memorial Hall gave it “no particular relation to anything.”
“I have always felt that the site was unfortunate in every way,” he continued.
French had never found the support to move the monument. But in the 1920s, the timing seemed fortuitous: Prentiss French — Daniel C. French’s nephew — was just finishing up his master’s degree in Harvard’s Department of Landscape Architecture.
The younger French “has been sounding various people connected with the University about moving the statue,” the letter reported. “He finds that all are favorable to it.” Would the Corporation consider relocating the monument?
French then suggested a particular site he had in mind: in front of University Hall.
“In the position named the statue would have [e]xcellent effect decoratively, facing the long walk to the gate,” he wrote.
One hundred years later, time has proven him right. On a grey Wednesday afternoon, I spoke with Gary R. Hilderbrand — the Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture & Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. We meet in the Yard, under the watchful gaze of John Harvard himself.
Hilderbrand easily enumerates a number of formal elements supporting the statue’s new location: its axial and symmetrical placement, its physical as well as symbolic centrality.
“It’s in front of one of Charles Bulfinch’s great buildings. It’s in front of the building where faculty convene to govern the university,” Hilderbrand says.
French was paying close attention to these surroundings: He hoped that his statue was “entitled to be intimately associated with the oldest of the College buildings,” all located in the Old Yard. (Harvard’s oldest building, Massachusetts Hall, was built in 1720 and lies just across the court.)
Lowell wasn’t immediately convinced. In order to help sway the president, French produced a life-size photographic reproduction of the statue. Mounted in front of University Hall, this model demonstrated the planned visual effect of moving the statue.
In the 1920s, a wide drive, now shortened, led directly from the Johnston Gate to John Harvard at University Hall — as Hilderbrand reiterates, right on axis. When I show the photograph to Hilderbrand, though, he points out something else, too. What he’d like me to notice most are the trees.
Hilderbrand tells me that many of the American elms in the photo were planted in the Yard around the turn of the 20th century. As the trees began to reach maturity in the 1920s, an appreciation of their qualities might have prompted fresh consideration of the Yard as a space, he explains. This also might have helped shape a reimagination of the Yard as a destination, with the John Harvard statue as its linchpin. In the 1920s, Hilderbrand says, the Yard was “coming into its own.”
Eventually, the Corporation agreed. In April 1924, the statue was moved to become the Yard’s centerpiece.
Nobody seems to have looked back since. As Hilderbrand and I discuss the public-facing significance of the monument, we’re outflanked: dissuaded by the bustle around John Harvard, a tour group has encircled us on the grass.
Nevertheless, whispers from long before our times continue. An oral tradition runs strong, passing down tidbits and factoids. As I leave, and as I see a tour guide reciting the statue’s “three lies,” I return to a comment Hilderbrand made near the beginning of our conversation.
How had he known where the statue had originally sat? “It’s lore,” he said. “I just knew it.”
