July 6, 1895

The College announced that it had bought the Vassar Hospital Farm, 200 acres adjacent to the college property on the west side of Hooker Avenue, for $14,500 and that the site would be used for a new plan for disposing of the College’s sewage, called intermittent filtration. A few days earlier, the Town of Poughkeepsie had given the College six months to build a sewer, at the probable cost of $40,000, to take its sewage to the Hudson River. Heretofore, it had been dumped in the Casperkill, which ran through the College grounds.

The new plan, which proved to be only a bit less expensive but was far more sanitary, had been urged on the board by the new alumna trustee, Ellen Swallow Richards ’70, a preeminent water scientist and head instructor at the MIT laboratory for women, which Richards called her laboratory for “sanitary chemistry.”