Yerkes Observatory, located in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, is a facility of the University of Chicago's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. The observatory opened in 1897 as the joint creation of three founders: William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago; Professor George E. Hale, the observatory’s first director; and Charles T. Yerkes, a wealthy Chicago businessman who provided funds for the erection of the observatory building. On the shores of Lake Geneva, this observatory was designed by Henry Ives Cobb, with landscape architecture by John Olmsted.
Yerkes became known in the astronomical community as the home of the last of the great refracting telescopes, a 40-inch instrument first exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. The observatory housed the university's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics until the 1960s, and was the site of some of the most significant research in modern astronomy and astrophysics.
From the guide to the University of Chicago. Yerkes Observatory. Logbooks and Notebooks, 1892-1988, (Special Collections Research Center University of Chicago Library 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637 U.S.A.)
