Time has not slighted the castled structure that has been standing at 10 Garden Street for the last hundred and forty years. Since Nathaniel Ireland built the house in 1807, it has grown steadily in size and importance, until today it is the center of a large women's college. Attitudes toward Fay House have changed too, though the trend has been different. In 1819 it was called, "One of the most pleasant and eligible situations in Cambridge for a literary gentleman," while a remark heard the other day went something like, "A gracious house, sure; but it must be hard to heat." "Ireland's Folly," whispered Cambridge when the seemingly pretentious building was erected, and of course they were partly right, for within two years the owner and his social-climbing wife were bankrupt, and Fay House went to Joseph McKean, the Boylston Professor of Rhetotic and Oratory.

McKean was a poor lecturer but an unusual man. "O I declare, I sometimes think he will look me right through," wrote one girl on hearing him speak. Nevertheless, he was studious, and the houses's spacious rooms had their first taste of bookishness in the five years of his residence. Fay House saw another prophesy of things to come in the 1820's, when Sophia Dana used the Oval Room to give the neighborhood girls some schooling in subjects that the Harvard men were studying. The classes continued through several years against fearful dangers, for, as an observer remarked, "It was hardly possible to avoid ridicule in making the experiment."

From that time until some one hundred and twenty years later, when Will K. Jordan took over as president of Radcliffe, Fay House was dominated by its womenfolk. For three years in the 1830's the daughters of Daniel Davis made Castle Corners, as it was called, famous for its hospitality. Then in 1835, Judge Samuel Fay bought the place, and for the next fifty years his wife and then his daughter entertained the Cambridge intelligentsia there. On one occasion, it is reputed that Maria Fay had Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and William James in her kitchen at the same time, all shelling peas. It was also in Fay House that the Rev. Samuel Gilman, a friend of Fay's, wrote the words of "Fair Harvard" for the College's 200th anniversary.

In 1885, a group of Harvard professors' wives--they called themselves the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women and boasted of forty students--bought the house for their headquarters. It cost them twenty thousand dollars, one half of their capital, but they were determined to give their girls the same sort of teaching the boys at Harvard received. It would seem that their plan was successful, for around the old mansion there grew Radcliffe College. Soon the classes moved to other buildings, and Ireland's Folly was used entirely for administration offices. Board meetings and teas were held in the Oval Room, and the Grand Ballroom upstairs became the headquarters of the Alumnae Association.

But signs remain of the old days of Castle Corners. The grandfather clock in the main hall still reminds one that the President's office next door was once a drawing room. The white-painted rooms are broad and still luxurious, and the landings of the stair case command a fine view of the Yard that used to be a henyard. But Fay House is a house with a present as well as a past. The sign on the third floor has a commanding message for today's Radcliffe girl. In soliciting funds for the College's 70th anniversary, it says, "when, if not now! Who else, if not you"