Gasson Hall and the road around the old Chestnut Hill Reservoir (now the Lower Campus), c. 1915.

A tradition and a spiritual vision are alive only if they are embodied in people and institutions. The story of Boston College illustrates how a tradition takes shape in a particular place and time and how it then adapts to changing times and needs. And when we get to the end of the story—or, rather, when we tell as much of it as we can and arrive at the present—we will want to ask how alive the tradition is, here and now at bc.

Foundations

Boston College was a response to the simplest impulse of Ignatian decision making: to see a need and do something about it. Famine in Ireland had brought huge numbers of immigrants to Boston in the middle of the nineteenth century. The population of the city almost doubled between 1842 and 1862. The effect was traumatic. The newcomers were not easily assimilated and, like many

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