Founding of Stanford University

Stanford University was founded by the railroad magnate and California senator Leland Stanford and his wife Jane Lathrop Stanford in memory of their only son, who had died of typhoid fever as a teenager. They chartered the institution in 1885 and it opened its doors in 1891 on the Stanford family's former horse farm near Palo Alto, with a campus planned by Frederick Law Olmsted and built in a Mission Revival style. Its first president was David Starr Jordan. Over the twentieth century Stanford grew into a leading research university, and through its engineering school and the Stanford Research Park it became closely tied to the rise of Silicon Valley and companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Google.

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