The Two Towers: Main

In those days it was a foreign country beyond the slope at Fruit Street where civilization then stopped. It was a common sight to see cows driven through Elm Street to pasture on Newton Hill.
      --Robert M. Washburn, 1923

When the first overture had been made to prospective contributors, Stephen Salisbury had offered cash and also a triangular piece of land at the north corner of Lincoln Square. This area was really too small for the school. The Common in the center of the City had also been suggested, but the argument of desecrating hallowed ground had hurriedly eliminated that possibility. Dale Hospital on Union Hill, where so many soldiers had convalesced during the Civil War, was a definite consideration. During the last few years fourteen large barracks had been added to the original building, which at one time had briefly housed a medical college. This property had four acres of land.

On the south of the City another possibility existed in the battlement of buildings known as Oread. Built in 1849 of stone quarried from Goat Hill, where it stood, this feudal castle had evolved into a ghost of the Middle Ages to the consternation of many Worcester citizens. Eli Thayer, its owner, had told no one why he was building it. Four stories high, it had turrets and towers fifty feet in diameter. There were no moats, but this was the only anachronism.

As revolutionary as was its architecture, the building's purpose was even more startling. In a year when Oberlin was the only college where girls were admitted, and a quarter century before other women's colleges existed, Oread had opened its doors to women college students. Within four years the school had had twelve teachers and a hundred and fifty students. By 1865 its founder, Eli Thayer, had become prominent in Congress and in national issues, and the school had suffered from his absence. Oread offered a solid structure, if that were a prerequisite for the Institute, and it could be bought for half its value.

The trustees conscientiously viewed all the sites and listened to the details of possible purchase, even though it was a foregone conclusion that they would choose another piece of property offered by Stephen Salisbury at the northwest end of town, where Mr. Salisbury owned at least two thirds of the land. The specified plot was part of the one hundred and fifty acres which the first Stephen Salisbury had bought from Cornelius Waldo on the west side of Mill Brook. The Salisbury land extended from Lincoln Square to far beyond Park Avenue and north to Chadwick Square. Almost all of it was uninhabited. The younger generation in the City had dubbed the area beyond Chestnut Street as "Oregon," because it, as well as the new state, was so far away from the center of Worcester. Far up Salisbury Street there were a few big farms and the Highland Military Academy, where so many officers had been trained during the Civil War. Every evening the City still held its breath waiting for the big sunset gun to be fired, a signal that the flag at the Academy was taken down for another day and all was well.

Absorbed now into other estates was the old eighty-five acre farm of Jo Bill, for whom the old trail that ran through the Salisbury