February 17, 2005

Wards' rightful return

Portraits of Montgomery, Elizabeth Ward have been restored, returned to lobby of memorial medical building

Portraits of pioneer Chicago catalog retailer A. Montgomery Ward and his wife, Elizabeth, have been restored and returned to the lobby of the Montgomery Ward Memorial Building.

The Chicago campus building named in honor of Mr. Ward is the Feinberg School of Medicine’s oldest structure.

The portrait restoration was partly funded by a gift from the A. Montgomery Ward Foundation.

Mr. Ward and a partner in 1872 established the world’s first mail-order business that was popular in rural pre-World War II America. The first catalog listed 162 items. Eleven years later, the Montgomery Ward & Company catalog had grown to 240 pages with 10,000 items. With the urbanization that took place in the United States after World War II, Ward’s merged with other companies and in 1985 discontinued its catalog.

Mr. Ward died in 1913. His widow decided to honor his memory with a major gift toward construction of the first building on the Chicago campus that would house Northwest-ern’s medical and dental schools in one central location. The medical and dental schools had been located in various buildings in downtown Chicago.

Mrs. Ward planned to give $3 million for the medical school building as a memorial to her husband. In making her gift Mrs. Ward wrote, “I am led to believe that the ideal of service dominates the various schools of Northwestern University…I have selected as a memorial the medical center because of its commanding site overlooking the lake, because it will render a very large measure of service to humanity, and because it will be as enduring as any memorial that can be devised.” 

Her original gift specified that $2.5 million be used for the construction of the building, with $500,000 set aside for an endowment for ongoing maintenance. Mrs. Ward later added $1 million to this gift to ensure that there would be enough funds to construct the building as planned. In 1926 she gave an additional $4 million to the schools to create an endowment to support faculty salaries, research and scholarships. At the time these were the largest gifts the University had ever received from one individual.

Construction of the building began in 1925. James Gamble Rogers, the architect for all of the original buildings on the Chicago campus, designed the Ward building as the largest and most prominent structure on the campus.

Groundbreaking for the Ward Building was held in conjunction with groundbreaking ceremonies for the entire Chicago campus on May 8, 1925. Construction began immediately and the cornerstone was laid on June 11, 1926.