Founders Day Marks 132 Years With a Plaque Where the First Nineteen Students Met

The university marked Founders Day on Thursday, 132 years to the day after the Porter Manual Training School held its first class, by unveiling a bronze plaque on the Main Street building where it happened.

Those first nineteen students met in two rented rooms above a feed and implement store in what is now the Depot District. They learned drafting, joinery and arithmetic at benches the instructor built himself. The school stayed there until Founders Hall opened on the old fairgrounds in 1912, and the building went on to be a hardware store, a dance studio and an insurance office. Since 2019 its upper floor has been part of Foundry Coworking, which suggested the plaque.

“Everything we have — fourteen buildings, seven colleges, eight thousand students — started in two rooms that smelled like oats. It seemed like the least we could do to tell people walking down Main Street.”

— Chancellor Dr. Elaine Vandehey

Pinning down the exact rooms took the university archives most of a year. Archivist staff matched the address in an 1893 rent ledger to an 1895 fire-insurance map, then to a 1901 photograph in which a hand-lettered “PORTER SCHOOL” sign is visible in a second-floor window. That photograph is on display through December in the Special Collections reading room.

The rest of the day followed what has become the usual pattern:

• The Founders Hall bell rang nineteen times at 8 a.m., once for each original student.
• Founders Union served 2,400 slices of sheet cake, cut by the chancellor and the student body president until their arms gave out.
• The history club ran walking tours from campus to the new plaque along the Riverfront Trail.

The plaque was cast in the Founders Hall foundry lab by students in a metal-casting course, from a pattern designed by an industrial design senior. It is mounted beside the building’s street door at the corner of Main and Depot. For more on the school’s first decades, see the university’s history page and the Depot District guide.

Contact: Office of University Communications, news@uwporterfalls.edu