Correspondence (incoming) - R

San Francisco June 24th 2116 1/2 Steiner Str.

Dear Sir, In reply to your letter of June 20th I beg to correct a misunderstanding on your part. My idea in offering my service at so early a time was, when you knew, that a competent man was within easy reach, you might consider the benefit in having the books, already on hand and everyday coming, assorted and taken entirely charge off, that when the day arrives to place them in their proper building everything would be ready, all numbered, catalogued etc. Calling this to your attention I remain respectfully yours. [Eigil?] [Ramél?] The question of salary has no importance whatever for me.

Akron, [O.?] May 24th 1887 Hon. Leland Stanford, San Francisco, Cal.

Dear Sir: I am an artist with more than forty years experience at the easel [and?] because I hope and work for a nobler, more distinctively national art than we have yet seen in America, I write you. Allow me, without further introduction, to say the things I wish to lay before you. You are aware that we have in our country none of that grand art which distinguishes Italy and some other parts of Europe, and I think the reason is to be found in the fact that we have no pace to invite or to put such works. In Italy churches have been the natural receptacles of great compositions, but in this country churches are nearly all of the gothic style which leaves no large wall spaces to invite the invention of the painter, beside the prejudice against that kind of church decoration has not died out of Protestantism; so we can hope for no great sacred art in America for a century to come.

Now while the church offers no expectation to the [painter?] our Universities and colleges have all the breadth of wall and breadth of mind required to foster a [national?] art of the grandest character. These thoughts came to me last winter, on presenting to Oberlin College my painting of John [Brown?] meeting the [stare?] mother and child, when [on?] his way to [execution?]. There were the vast, barren wall spaces inviting the [noblest?] invention, while the best intellect in the land was there to [give?] appreciative study to the works, but who is to give the footing [or?] the idea to stand on? I proposed and described four other [large?] works - the John Brown was a high picture 7x10 feet - to the Oberlin faculty, but they felt too poor to venture, as the enclosed reply of [Prest?] Fairchild will show. Now you are building a great university, can you not make it embrace the grandest of monumental paintings, as no other institution in America has been able to do, and open the way not to the making of great artists alone, but to that general appreciation of the best which comes of being in [long?] continued contact with it? During forty years I have been disciplining myself for such work, and nothing could delight me more than the painting for the walls of your University, canvasses worthy of the grandest of your undertaking. It would not be expensive - I work for the delight of expression and of honorable mention among my fellow men. Will you think of this matter and oblige Yours very respectfully, Louis Ransom, 121 Brown St., Akron, O.

Tulare: Nov 12. 88 Dear sir:

I would like very much to know in regards to Senator Stanford's College; as I heard of it some time ago and suppose it has started by this time. I would like to attend the College this winter if it is as I understood in regards to the rates. I know no one that the College concerns, and for that reason I direct this to the principal hoping to hear from the College soon. Respectfully Yours [Imbrie?] [D.?] Reinhart Tulare City. Cal.

To the Honorable Leland Stanford

Dear Sir;-

In view of the fact that you have founded a great University on the Pacific Coast, and undoubtedly desire that its Faculty should be composed of men eminent for their attainments and qualified by experience to perform their duties in a manner to reflect honor on the institution they represent, - we respectfully suggest for consideration, by yourself and those to whom you may entrust the work of selection, the name of Professor [E.?]L.O. Roehrig, one of the founders of the American Philological Association, member of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia) and honorary Member of many learned societies in this country, as well as in Europe, Laureate of the Imperial Institute of France, Doctor of Philosophy and Doctor of Medicine, Knight of Imperial Orders for literary merit, etc., and the author of several well known text-books of the German and other languages, as well as of noted monographs on the Irish, Finnish, Arabic, Turkish, and Modern Greek languages, and the dialects of the North American Indians, published by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. (See [Alibone?], Dictionary of British and American Authors, Vol. II. R. under Roehrig). He filled for seventeen years the Chair of Professor of Sanskrit and Living Oriental Languages, at the Cornell University, which he left, a year ago, on account of his health, for California where he is living now and residing in Los Angeles. No. 301 Wall Street