I had two surprising and remarkable days in the archives last week, one leading directly to the other. It’s going to take more than one post to explain it all, so I guess I’ll just begin at the beginning. I had a student come in for help with a very interesting project–she was looking for any photos and information that might help shed light on the campus ecosystem in the early years, including things such as flora and fauna, drainage issues and possible locations used for growing crops. I find this inherently interesting, but it’s also interesting from a purely archival standpoint. There’s plenty of relevant evidence, but it’s scattered throughout the archives in numerous manuscript collections and photo files. As we sat and talked about it, I was able to pinpoint a few things right away (I have a pretty strong grasp of campus drainage issues!) but then had to stretch a bit. I remembered reading stories from early students about specimen collecting with Rice’s first biology professor, Julian Huxley, and so turned to the small collection of papers we have from Joseph I. Davies, Huxley’s assistant during those early years. And things suddenly came alive.
Davies was a remarkable man. He came from England in 1914 with Huxley to serve as his assistant. Huxley soon left, but Davies stayed, first as a lecturer and later as a professor after earning a Rice Ph.D. in biology. He was by all accounts a great teacher. (I’ll say a lot more about him tomorrow when I get to the next part of the story.) What made my heart leap on this day was something in his small collection that I had overlooked before: a half-dozen sheets of slides–beautiful kodachrome slides–that he had taken of campus in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
I find many of these images simply dazzling. (I was not surprised when I saw that he had listed photography as a hobby on a biographical form.) Davies gave great thought to what he was doing when he took them, took great care to show what things really looked like to a careful observer. He took pictures of campus the same way I do–he climbed up on top of things for a better angle, turned around and photographed the other direction, returned to the same shot at different times and in different conditions. I know it’s not reasonable, but I couldn’t help but feel that he was talking to me.
Because he was taking pictures in ways that were not ordinary, many of the images were confounding to me. This was compounded by the fact that he was often photographing change. Stephen Fox came in and helped me sort some of them out, but I’m still puzzling over others.
Zoom in on them and enjoy yourselves. More tomorrow.
Combining the last photo with the ones Dessler took of the Space Science Building’s construction, I see that Space Science was built at a different time than the other two parallel science buildings. Right? If so, which came first?
Anderson Biological Lab and Keith Wiess Geological Lab came first. I’ll put up some “before and after” construction pictures of them tomorrow.
I do remember that the Space Science building was thought of as “new” when I was at Rice in late ’60’s but that the other two weren’t. Glad to have this confirmation!
He was an incredible teacher. He wa forced by the university to retire due to his age. At his retirement party he stated “if I helped one person, my life has been worthwhile”. The next day he died of a heart attack. This is not true – it was a broken heart due to leaving his teaching post.
His comment has remained with me all these years.
Gus Schill
Are picture 2 and picture 3 from almost the same spot, but looking right and then looking left? I hope you will tell us where picture 1 was taken – I can’t place it at all. I am fascinated by campus buildings and change. During my attendance at Rice, the only thing rebuilt was sinking sidewalks. (I attended from 1976 to 1982).
It’s amazing to see how much the campus changed during the ’50s. I first set foot on the campus when I attended a Baylor-Rice game (1960, I think). By that time, the place looked much as it did when I arrived in 1969 as a freshman. Space Science, Herman Brown, and Lovett College were yet to be built in the ’60s. Hard to imagine the towering weeds near what would become the biology building.
The pictures showing the undeveloped west end of the campus reminded me of listening to my wife’s grandmother (Ruby South ’19) talk of her experiences while an undergraduate. In particular, she spoke of “collecting frogs Dr. Huxley’s lab in Harris Gully”. I don’t know that she ever met Huxley because she would have arrived in fall 1915. She obviously would have worked for Davies.
Ruby South went on to earn an MD from UTMB after graduating from Rice.
Are those pine trees in the foreground along the road in the picture that has now been revealed to be the site of the RMC? The one on the right has some kind of support posts around it.
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