Harvard Club

The Harvard Club, based in Boston, was the first alumni club of Harvard University. Founded in 1855, the Club was initiated by two members of the Harvard College Class of 1853, Charles William Eliot, a tutor of mathematics at Harvard (and future president of Harvard), and Edward Holmes Ammidown. Their ambitious plan gained the support of such notable alumni as President James Walker, and in July 1855, a circular was sent to 1400 alumni. The proposed club met with wide ranging support, and the club was subsequently established at a meeting of the graduates of Harvard College on October 12, 1855. At first referred to as the Club of the Graduates of Harvard College, the organization was officially established as the Harvard Club in December 1855.

Membership in the club was open to any graduate of the University, including honorary degree recipients, and past and present faculty as well as members of the Board of Overseers and the Corporation. As they wrote in a circular distributed on February 16, 1857, the Committee of the Harvard Club believed the Club was "destined to supply a want that has been much felt, by the establishment of a club on higher principles than are usual in most American institutions of the kind, in which the bar-room and the billiard-table have usurped the place of literary and social intercourse; and composed as it must necessarily be of intelligent and educated men who are bound together by a common interest in Harvard College and in liberal studies, and who comprise many of the leading men to whom the republic of Massachusetts must look for its future progress in ethics and politics, in physical science, and in literature and art."

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