McCormick Hall Cornerstone Ceremony

On May 5, 1959, approximately nine months after groundbreaking took place, the Law School hosted a cornerstone ceremony for McCormick Hall and the Coon Library. Several influential figures participated in the event, such as then-Governor William G. Stratton, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, and Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan were among those who addressed the gathered audience.

Despite the prestige of these speakers, the main event was the placement of the cornerstone itself. While, historically, cornerstones played a functional part in the building’s structure, today they are often symbolic. The cornerstone for McCormick Hall was the latter, a thin stone with the year, 1959, engraved on the front-facing side. According to the June 1959 issue of The Reporter:  

Behind the stone was a copper box containing a glass tube, designed by the Northwestern Technological Institute to last for a thousand years. It contains a biography of Col. McCormick, vital statistics about the school, copies of the Law School publications, from pages of Chicago newspapers, and predictions made by twenty faculty members as to the changes in their field of law during the next one hundred years. 

Image, right: Northwestern University School of Law Cornerstone Ceremony, Robert R. McCormick Hall [pamphlet], 1959.