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Birdseye View of Pacific Grove | City Departments | Chautauqua
Early Businesses | The Faces of Chinatown | Feast of Lanterns
Growing up in the Grove | Grand Army of the Republic | Gardens in the Grove
Hazards of the Rocky Shores | A City of Homes | Hopkins Seaside Laboratory
Mammoth Stables & Horses | Hotel to Holman's | Lovers Point
RLS' Old Pacific Capital Quote | Pacific Grove People
The First Pledge of Allegiance | Pacific Grove on Track | C.K. Tuttle

The first building at Hopkins' Lovers Point location (at right) cost $700
and opened in 1892. The second building (at left) was added in 1894.
c. 1900. Photo #05.0-292-B, from the Museum's Tuttle Collection.

In the 1800s, the hands-on approach advocated by Harvard University's Louis Agassiz was considered revolutionary. This same approach was endorsed by Agassiz' student, David Starr Jordan, when he became the first president of Stanford. The Pacific Grove location was considered ideal because of its proximity to rocky intertidal areas and the convenience of the Southern Pacific Railroad connection to Palo Alto.

Funding for Hopkins' first building came from Timothy Hopkins, the Pacific Improvement Company, and the City of Pacific Grove. The acre of land on which it stood was a gift from the Pacific Improvement Company. In its early years, Hopkins Seaside Laboratory-as it was originally called-was a summer school, offering subjects like English literature (young John Steinbeck took several of these classes) as well as biology. It was also home to a number of world-class researchers, including Jacques Loeb. Pioneer neurobiologist and Pacific Grove civic activist/mayor Julia Platt studied here, and was probably drawn to move to the area because of Hopkins' lure.

By 1917, the Lovers Point location was bustling with tourist activity that disturbed the researchers' field work. The lab moved to its present location at China Point (now called Cabrillo Point), on the site of the Chinese fishing village that was destroyed by fire in 1906. One of the station's faculty members at this time, embryologist Harold Heath, later became director of the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History.

Faculty and students stand outside of the first building.
Man standing second from left (with gun) is Leverett Loomis,
curator of ornithology at California Academy of Sciences in the
1890s, and its director at the time of the 1906 earthquake.
c. 1893, from the Museum's collection.

Unidentified man at left holds pliers and Black-vented Shearwater
(which is present in the Monterey area in late fall & winter);
man in center is Leverett Loomis; unidentified man at right with oar.
c. 1895. #27.1-452-PBA, from the Museum's Tuttle Collection.

Man sits on horse in front of Hopkins.
c. 1900. #12.0-395-PBA, from the Museum's Tuttle Collection.

Man with Mola Mola stands under water tower.
c. 1895. #25.2-386-PA, from the Museum's Tuttle Collection.

Frank Mace MacFarland holds Brandt's Cormorant.
July 9, 1901, around 9:30 a.m. #04.0-260-LAP, from the Museum's Tuttle Collection.

Three men from Hopkins stand on Bird Rock (off of 17-Mile Drive in Pebble Beach) amidst nesting colony of Brandt's Cormorants. Man at left is sea slug expert Frank Mace MacFarland. The other two men are Philip Kingsworth Gilman, a physiology student in 1900, and Anton Julius Carlson, a physiology student in 1901.
July 9, 1901. #29.x-503-PAL, from the Museum's Tuttle Collection.