But once in Meadville how little he found with which to carry out his project—a log courthouse for a schoolhouse, and little or no money, though of what they had men gave freely. Now Timothy Alden knew that throughout the East were men of scholarly traditions convinced as was he that democracy would work only if men were trained to understanding and sacrifice. He believed that they would help his Western venture. In 1816 he went East to find out. He was not wrong in thinking there would be sympathy for the young college. Out of their meager store men gave—this one, fifty cents; that one, five dollars; few, more—and men gave books, one, two, five. The list of donors now in the college archives shows many of the best known names of the day—Lowell, Adams, Tucker, Parkman, Channing in Boston and twenty-nine fine New York names. Friends were made for Allegheny in every town and city where its brave story was told. Timothy Alden came back with $361 in money and with books, more needed than money, estimated to be worth $1,642.26.
From that time he kept the undertaking steadily before the East, promoted it by every method known to the times. A great response to his passionate effort came in 1819 when the college world of the East was shocked by learning that William Bentley of Salem, Massachusetts, had left his famous collection of “classical and theological books, dictionaries, lexicons and Bibles” to a college in the wilderness of northwestern Pennsylvania, a college without a home, still doing its work in a log courthouse. That gift, long a bitter drop in the cup of Harvard, it is said, made a home of its own necessity for Allegheny, and in 1820 the corner stone of Bentley Hall, named for the donor, was laid. It took many years to complete it; but, when done on the lines Timothy Alden had himself laid down, it was one of the most beautiful buildings in the country. Today it easily stands after Independence Hall as the most perfect piece of Colonial architecture in the state of Pennsylvania. For me Bentley Hall was an extraordinary experience. It was the first really beautiful building I had seen, a revelation, something I had never dreamed of.
Fifty-six years had passed since the corner stone of Bentley Hall was laid, and not one of them without disappointments and sacrifices. More than once it had seemed as if the brave attempt must fail. Two buildings only had been added in these years: Culver Hall, a frame boarding house for men; Ruter Hall, a grim uncompromising three-story rectangular brick structure, fifty by ninety feet in size, a perfect reflection of the straitened period to which it belonged. The “Factory” was our slighting name for Ruter Hall, but in this stern structure I was to find a second deep satisfaction—the library; in a room on the top floor, ninety feet long and at least sixteen in height was housed not only the splendid Bentley collection, but one even more valuable, that of Judge James Winthrop of Cambridge, Massachusetts, rare volumes from the great presses of Europe, three tons of books brought overland in wagons by Boston teamsters in 1822. They lined the great unbroken inside wall, as well as every space between openings. From the window seats one looked out on the town in the valley, its roofs and towers half hidden by a wealth of trees, and beyond to a circle of round-breasted hills. Before I left Allegheny I had found a very precious thing in that severe room—the companionship there is in the silent presence of books.
Allegheny did not of course admit women at the start; but the ferment caused by the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment making it clear that only men were to be regarded as citizens stirred the Allegheny constituents mightily. Its chief patron, as I have said, was the Methodist Church. Now the Methodist Church was a militant reformer. The greatest of its bishops, Matthew Simpson, had backed Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony and their colleagues at every step. Leaders among Methodist women had been abolitionists, aggressive temperance advocates, and now they became militant suffragists. Their influence began to tell. In 1870, with misgivings in not a few minds the admission of women was voted. This was the same year that the University of Michigan opened its doors to women, and two years before Cornell. In the six years before I entered ten women had graduated. When I came there were but two seniors, two juniors, no sophomores. I was a lone freshman in a class of forty hostile or indifferent boys. The friendly and facetious professor charged with the care of the “young ladies” put it that I was “Lost in the Wilderness of Boy.”
From the first I was dimly conscious that I was an invader, that there was abroad a spirit of masculinity challenging my right to be there, and there were taboos not to be disregarded. My first experience was that of which Virginia Woolf speaks so bitterly in “A Room of One’s Own”—the closing of the college green to her at Oxbridge. Nearly fifty years before her book was written I was having at Allegheny the same experience.
The sloping green of the campus below Bentley Hall was inviting. Between classes I made my way one day to a seat under a tree only to hear a horrified call from the walk above, “Come back, come back quick.” An imperative summons from an upper-class woman. “You mustn’t go on that side of the walk, only men go there.”
It was not so simple to find a spot where you could go and be comfortable. If Bentley Hall, where all the classes were held, was a beautiful piece of architecture, its interior could hardly have been more severe. The rooms were heated with potbellied cast-iron stoves, seated with the hardest wooden chairs, lighted by kerosene lamps. In winter (and the winters were long) the snow tracked in kept the floors wet and cold. Often one wore a muffler in chapel. But of all that I was unheeding. My pioneer childhood served me well. Moreover, I realized at the start that I had found what I had come to college for, direction in the only field in which I was interested—science. I found it in a way that I doubt if Cornell could have given me at the moment, shy and immature as I was: the warming and contagious enthusiasm of a great natural teacher, one who had an ardent passion for those things which had stirred me and a wide knowledge which he fed by constant study and travel—Jeremiah Tingley, the head of Allegheny’s department of natural science.
Professor Tingley was then a man of fifty, sparkling, alive, informal. Three years before, he had been one of the fifty chosen from many hundred applicants to spend the summer with Louis Agassiz on the island of Penikese in Buzzards Bay. Agassiz had planned with enthusiasm for the Penikese Summer School, and for those privileged to enter who could understand and appreciate it was an unforgettable experience; certainly it was for Jeremiah Tingley. He carried there Agassiz’s faith in observation and classification, as well as his reverence for Nature and all her ways. For both men the material world was but the cover of the spirit. Professor Tingley would quote Agassiz sometimes: “Nature always brings us back to absolute truth whenever we wander.”
This fervent faith had a profound and quieting effect on my religious tumult. I learned a new word: Pantheism. Being still in that early stage of development where there must be a definite word by which to classify oneself, I began to call myself a pantheist—and I had a creed which I repeated more often than the creed I had learned in childhood:
Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand Little flower—but _if_ I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.
It reassured me; I was on the right track, for was I not going to find out with the microscope what God and man are?
Professor Tingley’s method for those he found really interested in scientific study was to encourage them to look outside the book. There was where I had already found my joy; but I suspected it was the willful way, that the true way was to know first what was in the books. Here in Professor Tingley’s classes you were ordered to go and see for yourself. He used to tell us a story of his first experience at Penikese. A stone was put before him, a round water-washed stone, on which he was to report. He looked at the stone, turned it over. There was nothing to report. “It is not the outside, it is the inside of things that matters,” said Agassiz. And in the laboratory that became our watchword: Look inside.
Discovering my interest in the microscope, I was not only allowed, I was urged to use the magnificent binocular belonging to the college, was given the free run of the laboratory along with a few as crazy as myself. Here my most exciting adventure apart from what I found under the microscope came from actually having my hands on a “missing link.” Evolution, to which I was clinging determinedly, could only be established, I realized, by discovering the links. There was one peculiar to the waters in our valley, the _Memopomo Alleghaniensis_, a creature twelve to fifteen inches long with gills and one lung, able to live in the water or mud as circumstances required. The mud puppy, as it was appropriately called, was slimy, loathsome, but I worked over it with awe. Was I not being admitted into the very workshop of Nature herself—seeing how she did it?