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Description

Decorative vintage pictorial birdseye view of the campus and grounds at Harvard, made by Alva Scott Garfield in 1959.

The buildings on the Harvard campus at the time are pictured in a bird's eye view style. Note that Leverett Towers at the lower right of the image was opened in 1960. The map is marked copyright 1959, and Alva Scott Garfield obviously included these landmarks that were appearing on the campus.

The map includes the coats of arms of the various Harvard houses, including Eliot, Kirkland, Adams, Leverett, Quincy, Lowell, Winthrop, and Dunster. The map borrows this, and some other visual devices, from Edwin Judson Schruers, A Propsect of Harvard University and of Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1935.

The map shows significant amounts of historical information about events and places - particularly sports - and an inset illustration: "Harvard College During the Revolution... From an engraving by Paul Revere". That illustration is surrounded by the following text:

Harvard College founded by a vote of the General Court of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay on October 28, 1636. November 15, 1636, college "ordered to bee at Newtowne." College opened summer of 1638. May 2, 1638 Newtowne changed to Cambridge. The college was not called Harvard College until 1639, On Sept. 14, 1638, John Harvard died and left half of his estate and his library to the college. On March 13, 1639, the General Court voted to name the college Harvard College.

As for Radcliffe College, the following historical note is provided:

Founded in 1879, Radcliffe was nameless until 1882 when called "The Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women" but nicknamed the "Harvard Annex." In 1893, it was voted to be called Radcliffe College for Anne Radcliffe, Lady Mowlson, who gave Harvard a scholarship in 1643.

In the lower-left corner are a further series of notes on Harvard's history of intercollegiate sport. The notes paint a rosy picture of Harvard's successes:

"Soldiers Field" so called by Major Henry Lee Higginson, who erected a shaft to friends killed in Civil War.

Rowing is the oldest intercollegiate sport at Harvard. First Harvard-Yale race Aug. 3, 1852. Harvard won.

Track and field sports organized in 1874. Frist Harvard-Yale track meet in May, 1891. Harvard won, 85-27.

Tennis started at Harvard in 1883 when a team in the Intercollegiate Tournament won both singles + doubles. Hockey started as minor sport in 1900, made major sport in 1912.

Baseball played at Harvard since 1863; first intercollegiate game at Providence on June 27, 1863. Harvard beat Brown 27-17. First Harvard-Yale baseball game in 1868. Harvard won, 25-17.

Harvard-McGill game played on Jarvis Field in 1874, first game of intercollegiate rugby played in this country. It lead directly to present intercollegiate game. First Harvard-Yale game played in New Have on Nov. 13, 1875. Harvard Won.

Alva Scott Garfield herself was a graduate of Wellesley College, although she had attended Radcliffe in the late 1920s. Her first pictorial map was that of her alma mater, Newe Mapp of Wellesley, published in 1926. Garfield produced a series of so-called "Scott-Maps" of places such as Harvard, Boston, Concord, Salem, Cape Cod, Maine, and New Jersey.