Golden anniversary

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(Image: Rendering of southwest tower, 1920) Meant as a gift for the University's 50th anniversary, the new stadium would embody the University's transition from a "Little College in the Cornfield" to an elite center of higher education. President William Oxley Thompson called it the University's "greatest single enterprise." Built to inspire the state and the nation, Ohio Stadium was to be, in the words of a Stadium Committee brochure, "a Great Stoneface, summoning the sons & daughters of Ohio to wholesome play." Such high-flown language obscures the real ambition inherent in the project: a campus whose entire value in land and buildings was $7 million had undertaken to build a $1 million addition. This would be tantamount to today's University adding, in one year, $150 million to its $1 billion-plus endowment fund, or 250 acres to its 1,700-acre Columbus campus. The University's "greatest single enterprise", as Thompson noted, had, in fact, become the University's first effort at fund raising. OSU Trustees wanted the Stadium to be paid for with private money so the University's requests for financial support from the state legislature would not be compromised.