When George Merrick dreamt of a great tropical city, he dreamt of a great university. In the promotional material for Coral Gables, Merrick described a city of tropical splendor whose Edenic gardens would inspire the highest social order. A campaign brochure of 1926 entitled, "An Investment in Humanity and Prosperity," placed the University in that garden, describing the University of Miami as an institution of learning and culture whose "entire aim will be to develop original thought and the personal powers of each student." The pamphlet was embellished with images of "grand halls, noble arcades, libraries and cloisters," and a text exhorting the citizens of Miami to contribute to the University's $10 million Campaign, to which Merrick alone had pledged $5 million and 160 acres of land.

The new University was to be composed of 12 schools and colleges including a College of Liberal and Applied Arts that would "endeavor to develop the painter, the sculptor and the architect in the finest medium for self expression in the world," while simultaneously making "work practical and economically valuable." Merrick believed the University of Miami would be the meeting point of the Americas, "where the foundation may be laid for everlasting peace on the Western Hemisphere: where commerce will receive its greatest impulse."

On February 4, 1926 George Merrick addressed the citizens assembled at the corner-stone laying ceremony at the University of Miami for the Solomon G. Merrick Building honoring Merrick's father, a Congregationalist minister. George Merrick distinguished between the "ephemeral insignificance" of the commercial institutions he had built and the "permanently real . . . things of the intellect and spirit that alone spell the true life of a land." He compared the founding of his father's alma mater, Yale University, with the pioneer spirit now active in Miami and read from a poem he'd written to honor his father's "courage in hardship" in which each verse concludes with the phrase "When those groves begin to bear."

Merrick expected that his beloved grove of academe would soon yield the fruit of 5000 students and a prosperous institution. He predicted that the founding of the University of Miami would be a "tame and easy struggle." What he could not foresee was the devastating hurricane of September 17, 1926. Marjory Stoneman Douglas, an early faculty member in the department of English, described in her epochal work The Everglades: River of Grass, the destruction and tragedy of that fateful night. She observed that after all was washed away, "What was left were such foundations of buildings or ideas as had been well and truly laid (1987 reprint of 1947 edition, p. 340)."

Certainly the University was one such idea. An unknown historian in "The University of Miami- The First Twenty-Five Years," described the original vision of the campus as "a towering Spanish Renaissance Palace of education . . . on an artificial hill 200 feet high." Although construction halted on the palace, the University found new headquarters on Anastasia Avenue in Coral Gables and opened its doors to 560 students in that first class of October 1926. When the University moved back to the campus in 1946 with 2000 students and fresh funds to house and educate the returning veterans of World War II, the Solomon G. Merrick building was completed in what the 1951 chronicler called "the brilliant airy effects of functional modern." Marion Manley, Florida's first woman architect, worked on the campus masterplan and was responsible for a number of the new buildings including the present facilities of the School of Architecture.

The fall of 1996 opened to 13,800 students in 130 undergraduate and 175 graduate and professional programs in 14 colleges and schools: Architecture, Arts and Sciences, Business Administration, Communication, Continuing Studies, Education, Engineering, Graduate, International Studies, Medicine, Rosenstiel School of Marine Science, Music, Nursing, and Law. While much has changed, the University has remained an independent, non-sectarian, non-profit institution, and has retained Merrick's original commitment to its role in the Americas and the Caribbean. The original campus has grown to 260 acres with additional campuses for Rosenstiel, on Virginia Key just north of Coconut Grove; Medicine, which is located west of downtown Miami; a south campus research center and field stations in the Everglades, Florida Keys and the Bahamas. Although the struggle has never been "tame and easy" Merrick's groves have been fruitful.

Reprinted from the School of Architecture: http://www.arc.miami.edu/school/UM_history.html

Chronology of the University:

http://www.library.miami.edu/umhistory/1980.html