Walking by Old Chapel or going down into the Rathskeller, you have probably noticed – and perhaps, maybe once or twice even walked into – a tiny, walled-in garden identified only by a small sign outside the entrance as “Mrs. Perkins’ Garden – 1866-1920.”
The garden was not always this small, and there was a time when you didn’t have to ask, “Who is Mrs. Perkins?”
Mrs. Annie Perkins was the wife of Maurice Perkins, professor of chemistry at the College from 1865 to 1901.
Born in Natchez, Miss., in 1835, Annie Dunbar Potts was the daughter of the Reverend and Mrs. George Potts. Annie and Maurice were married in 1864 and came to Union a year later. They lived in Hale House, in what is now the Milano Lounge, until their deaths-his in 1901, hers in 1922. They had three children.
Both Professor and Mrs. Perkins were well-known on campus, he as a popular and respected professor and she as an active member of the campus community. In the September-October, 1922, issue of the Union Alumni Monthly, Mrs. Perkins was remembered as an important link to the past and present of the College. The article reported that she remembered President and Mrs. Eliphalet Nott and Isaac “Captain Jack” Jackson, connections that take us “almost to the very earliest days of the college,” as the magazine put it.
Mrs. Perkins was fluent in several languages and often volunteered as an interpreter for the non-English speaking employees of the General Electric Company. She held readings of the “classics” in her parlor, was a frequent contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, and was said to have written daily letters to her children when they were grown.
Her garden, which began in the courtyard directly behind Hale House, seems to be Mrs. Perkins’s defining characteristic. The Monthly says, “And many of those who came to Union… will remember her personality, her house and her garden.” She was a woman of “very striking character” who “loved to surround herself with beauty and her parlors and her flower garden were an index of her taste and will be remembered by all who knew them.”
What happened to the garden after Mrs. Perkins’s death is unclear. In the summer of 1941, it was destroyed by excavation and redesigned. Restoration work this summer expanded the garden and incorporated a new entrance to the Rathskeller.
Another landmark is found near Achilles Rink. The bridge that crosses Hans Groot’s Kill here is not just any bridge-it is a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.
The Squire Whipple Bridge is named for the father of scientific bridge building, who graduated from Union in 1830. The bridge was reassembled by Union students from parts of Whipple bridges found in disrepair in nearby areas.
There are a number of named places on campus where the wanderer can sit and relax.
Surrounded by the massiveness of the Science and Engineering Center is a quiet refuge named the Theodore R. McIlwaine Courtyard. Funds for the plantings here were provided by friends, colleagues, and business associates of McIlwaine, the business manager of the College, who died in 1970.
The reading court near the east entrance to Schaffer Library is a memorial to Herbert L. Willetts ’23. President of Mobil Oil Corporation, he served as a trustee of the College. Funds were provided by his family.
The courtyard between the Murray and Ruth Reamer Campus Center and the Arts Building is the Chester Arthur Courtyard, named, of course, for the 1848 graduate of Union who became the twenty-first president of the United States. The nine-foot bronze statue of Arthur came from the estate of John Starin. Commander Starin, who operated a large fleet of commercial and passenger boats in New York, greatly admired Arthur and erected the statue when he built his estate near Fultonville, N.Y., in the 1880s.
Two benches in the courtyard-gifts of the Class of 1996-face the Kappa Alpha Gate, which provides entry to Jackson’s Garden. The gate is adorned with the famous words “Climb High, Climb Far. Your Goal the Sky, Your Aim the Star.” Built to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the first social Greek letter college fraternity in the country, the gate also pays tribute to Dr. Daniel MacMartin Stimson, Class of 1854, a brother of Kappa Alpha. Dedicated in 1925, it was the last memorial gateway to be erected on the Union campus.
Behind the Murray and Ruth Reamer Campus Center and just inside Jackson’s Garden are three sitting areas. The first, by Kappa Alpha Gate, is named for John Storrs Cotton, an 1897 graduate of the College who became an economic botanist with the United States Department of Agriculture. Nearby is an open garden picnic area, made possible by a gift in 1989 from the H. Schaffer Foundation (the same Henry Schaffer for whom the library is named). And just a few steps away is a fountain and small sitting area given by Robert Avon Smith ’52 and Ruth Anna Smith in honor of the College’s Bicentennial. The welcoming inscription says, “When the world wearies, and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden.”
Four named gates serve as entrances for visitors to the College. Here’s how each came to be:
The Blue Gate, located on Union Street and erected in 1813, was so named because of the color of paint-blue, of course-put on its wooden pickets. The first evidence that it was referred to as Blue Gate dates to 1857.
In the late 1940s, the pillars of Blue Gate were battered by speeding motorists taking the turn off Nott Terrace a little too fast. The six original fraternities founded at Union-Kappa Alpha, Sigma Phi, Delta Phi, Psi Upsilon, Chi Psi, and Theta Delta Chi-were approached and agreed to donate money to restore the gate. Lawrence White, the College architect at the time, designed the pillars to take note of the role that Union played in the founding of college fraternities.
The Brownell Gate, located on Nott Street, was presented to the College around 1911 by the New York Alumni Association. It is named for Silas Brownell, Class of 1852, a member of Kappa Alpha, Phi Beta Kappa, and an alumni trustee of the College.
Perhaps the best-known gate, the John Howard Payne Gateway, is on Union Street and serves as the main gateway to the College. It was dedicated on June 13, 1911, a little more than 100 years after John Howard Payne had been a student at Union. Four verses of Payne’s famous song, “Home Sweet Home,” written in 1823 for the opera Clari, or the Maid of Milan, are inscribed on the pillars of the gateway.
As a young boy, Payne, of the Class of 1810, wanted to become an actor. His choice was not condoned by his father, a schoolmaster in Boston, and the elder Payne sent his thirteen year-old son to New York, where the boy worked with a merchant. In his spare time, however, John Payne began publishing a paper, The Thespian Mirror, which caught the eye of William Coleman, founder and editor of the New York Evening Post.
Impressed by young John’s accomplishments, Coleman made his paper public. A wealthy man, John Seamans, offered to pay for a college education for the young boy, hoping that Payne’s early talents as a writer could be improved and refined, and he would someday become an influential newspaper editor. That never happened, however; after his years at Union, Payne became the actor and writer he had always dreamed of being.
The Class of 1884 Gate was built from the donations of the Class of 1884. Dedicated in 1924, it is located off Union Avenue and serves as a gateway to South Lane.
The following poem about Union and the Blue Gate, written by Byron W. Reed ’06, appeared in the Alumni Review in June, 1946:
The Old Blue Gate
Dad was son of old Union. As a boy oft I heard him tell
Of eyes worn weak on “Whitey’s” Greek, how he tolled the Chapel bell,
Lost precious teeth catching baseball when catchers wore no mask,
Made a temperance speech by the college brook as a midnight hazing task.
Of a building called “Potter’s Folly” that stood uncompleted for years,
And a rather debatable tendency to welcome in engineers,
Of a lovely Jackson’s Garden with a graceful Nott Elm tree…
And that early and late, an Old Blue Gate would be waiting to welcome me.
And next to his Key, his pet treasure-he carried it all his life
Was an ever-useful and useable pearl-handled pocket-knife;
With a knowing smile, when questioned, he would readily admit
That not a single ‘farm-boy” blade remembered to bolster it.
All had been broken and all replaced, both handles also new,
But still, to Dad, ’twas the same old knife, a comrade tried and true.
The old Nott Elm has been born again in a sturdy seedling tree,
And dad’s delights in Union’s sights relived by you and me;
Now “Potter’s Folly” is our pride but the years have lent their weight
With the seasons’ change and the winters’ toll, to wear out the Old Blue Gate.
Would that we might rebuild each part and adapt to modern life,
Perpetuate the Old Blue Gate just like Dad’s old pocket-knife!
(The Nott elm mentioned was located in Jackson’s Garden; it died in 1937, at an age variously estimated from 350 to 600 years.)
Each of the fields that athletic teams play on bears the name of a prominent Union personality.
Frank Bailey Athletic Field and Track, commonly called Bailey Field, is named for Frank Bailey, Class of 1885, a loyal and respected alumnus who served as treasurer of the College from 1901 until his death in 1953. The Bailey name is also attached to one of the most prestigious student awards, the Bailey Cup, awarded annually to the senior who has rendered the most service to the College, and to three endowed professorships-the Frank Bailey Professor of Classics, the Frank and Marie Louise Bailey Professor of Physics, and the Marie Louise Bailey Professor of Mathematics.
Alexander Field, home to the softball team and a practice field for several other sports, was named in 1913 for Robert C. Alexander of the Class of 1880. Alexander practiced law in Elmira, N. Y., and later became a journalist. He organized the Union College Alumni Association of New York and was named a life trustee of the College in 1890.
Garis Field, home to soccer, is named for Charles F. Garis, dean of the College for forty four years until his retirement in 1947. Garis led the reorganization of the College’s Athletic Board, which established rules governing sports at Union in the 1930s and 1940s.