The Princeton of 1884 was a very different place. The Graduate School had not yet been born. Princeton University was still the College of New Jersey.
The Delaware and Raritan Canal was not a picturesque park but a means of mass transit; Lake Carnegie nothing but swampy farmlands. In 1884, the D & R Canal was half a century old, carrying millions of tons of cargo — mostly coal — between Philadelphia and New York.
C. W. Bird 1885 was the captain of the rowing team, and every day he and his crew competed with mule-drawn and steam-powered barges for space on the canal. In a land of small and shallow rivers, the canal contained a near-perfect rowing surface.
University buildings were still centered far up campus around Nassau Hall, years from sprawling down the hill towards a nonexistent Faculty Road. From his seat at water level on the canal, Bird would look past the mule-trod dirt path down into the low-lying farmlands occupied by swamps and shrubs — and dream of a lake. Little did he know that the campus would creep steadily towards his dream lake.
"The direction of campus growth has always been southward and eastward," said Ben Kessler, director of the slide and photograph collections of the Department of Art and Archaeology. "But I don't think the lake constrained that growth at all."
A passing barge periodically would force Bird and his crew to rest and they would sit there bobbing up and down, clinging to the past, suffering the present and wishing for the future. Eventually, the practice space was deemed too dangerous for further use.
On the other side of campus, the South East Club boasted a veritable laundry list of named University buildings. Back when West College was a dorm, it had a sister across the courtyard: East College. The South East Club was a group of undergrads who lived in the southern entryway of that building. This group of men — which included the Princetonians for whom Henry, Pyne, Dodge and Cuyler halls were named — convened twice yearly after graduation to relive old times and help their alma mater. Over the years, they donated acres of land and large chunks of the endowment.
It is the last name from the list of South East Club members that played the largest role in resurrecting the rowing club at Princeton.
Howard Russell Butler 1876 was the coxswain of the 1874 crew. But a decade after his graduation, his sport drowned in the too-industrial waters of the canal. Baseball, football and track dominated the Princeton athletic scene at the time and a rowing team without on-campus practice space could not survive. Thus when he peered into the unused lands between campus and the canal — land inhabited by the shallow progress of Stony Brook into the Millstone River — he saw a lake.
Maybe the idea came from Bird and his teammates, maybe it originated with Butler's South East Club and maybe it rose from the marshes into lore as the savior of crew. Wherever it grew, the Millstone River and its surrounding swamps had exploded into a lake in Butler's mind by 1902.
By then, Butler was a fairly accomplished painter, and as he painted a portrait of Andrew Carnegie, he made small talk by describing his college days on the rowing team. Because Carnegie had already built four other lakes, Butler mentioned this dream of a lake in Princeton. To his surprise, Carnegie liked the idea and enlisted Butler to estimate the cost.
With the help of three other members of the South East Club and the president of the New York Society of Civil Engineers, Butler came back with a number of $118,000 — a modest figure for a lake of that size. Carnegie approved the project. The next time he met with University President Woodrow Wilson, Carnegie mentioned to the future leader of the nation, "I am going to give a great gift to Princeton University. It's a lake."
Because the land was already low and swampy, Butler's plan was like something from an elementary school chemistry set: dam the low end of the lake, clear out the vegetation and fill the expanse with water. It was a simple plan — for Butler its enactment was anything but.
Ironically, the largest, most noticeable aspects of the project were easy. The dam 1,000 feet south of the Kingston mill? No problem. The new stone bridges over the lake at Washington Road and Harrison Street? Approved by Carnegie almost immediately. Clearing the future lake bed of trees, undergrowth and human detritus, while lowering the elevation by almost two feet? Done by the Hudson Water Lift Company for two bits per cubic yard.
The problem was that the University did not own the land — a collection of 31 farmers, herders and squatters separately did so.
Butler's main goal was thus to collect the contracts of these 31 different tracts of land, an unenviable task for a man spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of someone else's money. He managed to purchase seven of these plots of land early, but news soon leaked that Carnegie was backing the project. The price demanded by the opportunistic farmers immediately skyrocketed.
Over the course of almost two years, Carnegie became more and more disgruntled and began to blame Butler for the shortcomings.
Butler and Carnegie found themselves fighting. The farmers refused to sell only the land by the future lake site, but would agree to the sale of their entire holdings. Carnegie, however, agreed only to pay the initial $118,000 estimate — and expected the University to foot the rest.
Butler finally finished the acquisitions in 1904, but only after the farmers succeeded in making him buy more land than needed. The extraneous holdings, however, would prove to be a boon for campus growth down the hill. In demanding the sale of entire farms, the farmers unwittingly allowed Butler to not only clear land for a lake, but also for a University that would follow in its footsteps.
The lake itself opened in 1906. Although he felt betrayed by Carnegie — who ended up funding most of the $450,000 bill — Butler saw his dream become a reality. The 100-acre lake stretched 3.5 miles, averaging a depth of four feet and ranging from 400 to 1,000 feet in width. With a little vision, a little money and a lot of work, Butler had created a vast lake, and in the process resurrected a sport and bushwhacked a path for development of the lower part of campus.
Only now is his work beginning to reach its limit, as the University looks to the West Windsor fields across the lake for future development.
"Princeton has been fortunate to have the land on which to grow," Kessler said. "Yale, for example, has had to cannibalize its own holdings.
"Now, Princeton is eating into the athletic fields. Before, the lake was not an impediment, but it is an issue for the 21st century."
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