McGilvray & MemChu

Hey everyone!

I don’t know how familiar you all are with some of the architecture around campus but I found some information on Stanford’s first stone contractor, John Duff McGilvray. McGilvray was born in Scotland in 1847. While my sources provide different information about when he first came to America to learn his trade (looks like it was sometime around 1868-1870), he didn’t start working for the Stanfords until 1898. At Stanford, McGilvray built the original Memorial Church and its post-1906 earthquake reconstructed version, the Outer Quad, the Chemistry Building, and the gymnasium (across Palm Drive from the museum; destroyed in 1906.) But his legacy isn’t invoked only when you’re biking by MemChu: some of his other California projects included one of the early San Francisco opera houses, the current San Francisco City Hall, San Francisco’s Flood Building, and the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange. How cool!

Taryn

http://freepages.folklore.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~bldr/johnduff.html