El Campanil History at Mills College and Julia Morgan's First Commission

The hoodline website offers an interesting post by Will Callan, "Julia Morgan-designed Mills bell tower counts down to its 115th anniversary," with the history of El Campanil, the 72-foot campus bell tower at Mills College...believed to be the first freestanding bell tower on a U.S. college campus.

The tower was designed by Julia Morgan, the sole woman in her college class at U.C. Berkeley to earn a civil engineering degree and the first woman licensed to practice architecture in California. The tower was Morgan's first commission in 1903 and she was innovative in using reinforced concrete for the structure. The tower was completed in April 1904 and it was one of the few structures to withstand the great 1906 earthquake...and, it helped launch Morgan's career.

Callan also explores the decision of Susan Mills, co-founder of the women’s college. She and her husband Cyrus, former missionaries, had purchased the former women's seminary in 1865, moving it to Oakland six years later.  Historian Karen McNeill noted that the college's earlier reputation had followed it to its new home and Mills was eager "make a statement" and shake her institution’s “finishing-school past." 

Mills College also offers an audio clip from KQED's Forum where you can listen to host Dave Iverson speaking with historian Karen McNeill and architect and attorney Julia Donoho about the Julia Morgan’s legacy in the Bay Area, including her groundbreaking work designing El Campanil.