Collection on the Celebration of the Move of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from Boston to Cambridge

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Alumni Council appointed Charles A. Stone, class of 1888, as chair of the Dedication Reunion Committee to oversee the celebrations for the dedication of MIT’s new Cambridge campus, which took place on June 12, 13, and 14, 1916, a move from the original campus in Boston to the new campus in Cambridge.

President Richard C. Maclaurin named Edwin S. Webster, Ralph Adams Cram (faculty, Department of Architecture), C. Howard Walker, William T. Sedgwick, and others to a Technology Pageant Committee in January 1916. The Committee was charged to plan a suitable program for the dedication of the new MIT campus in Cambridge in June 1916. The completed program included a series of "masques" celebrating various subjects related to MIT history; also the construction of the Bucentaur, a ceremonial barge constructed to convey the charter (a facsimile) of the Institute from Boston to Cambridge across the Charles River.

The three-day reunion of MIT alumni and alumnae drew almost 4,000 graduates of MIT, approximately half of the entire alumni body. They attended the celebration to open the completely new Cambridge campus, a campus made possible after an anonymous donor gave MIT the money to purchase the land and construct the new buildings.

It was the organized opposition of MIT graduates which thwarted a proposed merger of MIT and Harvard a few years earlier at the turn of the century, so it was appropriate that the 1916 reunion, which also bid farewell to the Boston buildings that had been home to MIT for the previous fifty years, was organized and run by the alumni themselves along with faculty and undergraduates.

The Dedication Reunion Committee was divided into over twenty subcommittees responsible for the set of festivities. Reunion highlights were a “Farewell to Rogers,” referring to the Rogers Building on the Boston campus; an open house and exhibition at the new Cambridge campus; a water fete on the Charles River; graduation day exercises of the class of 1916; and the “Day of the Classes” trip to Nantasket Beach for a parade of reunion classes. On the final day, the new Great Court (now Killian Court) of MIT was the setting for the Pageant and Masque of Power, a spectacle organized by Professor Ralph Cram of the Department of Architecture. This included the arrival of the Bucentaur, a ceremonial barge constructed to carry the Institute's seal across the Charles River from Boston to Cambridge. That evening the reunion ended with a banquet at Symphony Hall. Banquet attendees in Boston were connected by telephone with those present in thirty-four cities throughout the United States who were able to listen to the program and participate in the proceedings in a telephone roll call of each alumni club.

The publicity and souvenir subcommittee produced a special booklet that offers a glimpse of the extensive program of activities with descriptions such as “Flight by Farnum Fish in a Wright Biplane” and “Masque of Power.”

Member names and subcommittees of the Dedication Reunion Committee are listed in Technology Review, volume 18, pages 585-587.