Pomona College history

Classes first began at Ayer Cottage, a rental house in Pomona, California, on September 12, 1888, with a permanent campus planned at Piedmont Mesa four miles north of the city.

Trustee Charles B. Sumner led the college during its first years, helping hire its first official president, Cyrus G. Baldwin, in 1890.

Pomona awarded its first diplomas—seven bachelor of arts degrees, two bachelor of letters degrees and one bachelor of science degree—to the Class of 1894.

In 1905, during president George A. Gates' tenure, the college acquired a 64-acre (26 ha) parcel of land to its east known as the Wash.

Pomona Hall also houses the Outdoor Education Center and has a rooftop classroom. It was built in 1908 and houses 60 students, all in singles.

Later buildings took inspiration from these styles, with usually three or fewer stories and stucco walls. It quickly expanded from 7 buildings in 1909—the time James Blaisdell took over as President.

In recognition of the College’s rapidly growing stature, Southern California’s first chapter of Phi Beta Kappa was established here in 1913.

In 1914, the Phi Beta Kappa honor society established a chapter at the college.

The College Gates, with Pearsons Hall in the background, after being built in 1915.

It was built in 1921, is the oldest residence hall on South Campus, and the second-oldest west of the Mississippi (after Smiley).

On October 14, 1925, Pomona's 38th anniversary, the college founded the Claremont Colleges consortium.

Scripps College, founded in 1926 and named in honor of founder Ellen Browning Scripps, is a women’s college with an enrollment of about 1,048.

It was originally built in 1929 as a library for the College.

Its endowment grew steadily, due in part to the introduction in 1942 of a deferred giving fundraising scheme pioneered by Allen Hawley called the Pomona Plan, where participants receive a lifetime annuity in exchange for donating to the college upon their death.

James Turrell, (born May 6, 1943, Los Angeles, California, United States), American artist known for work that explored the relationship of light and space.

Claremont McKenna College was established in 1946 as Claremont Men’s College, a liberal arts college to educate men for leadership in business and government.

Lyon made several progressive decisions relating to civil rights, including supporting Japanese-American students during internment and establishing an exchange program in 1952 with Fisk University, a historically black university in Tennessee.

Harvey Mudd College, named in memory of a former chairman of the Board of Fellows of The Claremont Colleges, was incorporated as the fourth undergraduate college in 1955.

The college's ethnic diversity also began to increase, and activists successfully pushed the consortium to establish black and Latino studies programs in 1969.

His grandest project, conceived in 1974, remained a work in progress: a multichambered observatory built beneath the Roden Crater in the Painted Desert near Flagstaff, Arizona, employing the bowl-shaped caldera as a vast aperture for a skyspace.

The college became coeducational in 1976 and was renamed after Pomona alumnus Donald C. McKenna ‘29.

In 1984 Turrell and Irwin were the first visual artists to be honoured as John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur fellows.

In 1991, the college converted the dormitory basements used by fraternities into lounges, arguing that this created a more equitable distribution of campus space.

Keck Graduate Institute (KGI), founded in 1997 with a gift from the W.M. Keck Foundation, is the newest member of The Claremont Colleges, dedicated to education and research related to the applied life sciences.

The Pomona College Organic Farm is an experimental Permaculture project located in the southeast corner of the campus and was created by a group of three friends in 1998.

His “ganzfields” (a term used to describe a uniform field of light with no point of focus or depth), as seen in The Light Inside at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1999), fill interior spaces with a luminous coloured haze and seemingly palpable planes of light.

In July 2000, the central coordinating and support organization was split off from Claremont Graduate University and incorporated independently as Claremont University Consortium.

Pomona's Board of Trustees adopted the College's first Environmental Policy in 2002.

On December 15, 2008, the college announced a decision to retain the song as the Alma Mater, but not to sing the song at either commencement or convocation.

The Draper Center for Community Partnerships, established in 2009, serves as Pomona's community engagement center.

On March 1, 2010, Pomona's dining service workers publicly announced their intention to attempt to form an independent labor union.

Seventeen workers (sixteen of them dining hall employees) could not produce documents showing that they were legally able to work in the United States, and they were fired on December 2, 2011.

In 2013 LACMA staged a retrospective that charted the arc of Turrell’s 50-year career, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts featured selections from its own collection, which represented the largest repository of Turrell’s work in the world.

In 2014, 85 students benefitted from summer internship funding.

In 2017, G. Gabrielle Starr became Pomona's tenth president; she is the first woman and first African American to hold the office.

In 2021 Turrell was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for sculpture by the Japan Art Association.