Thomas Lamb Eliot, 1920.
n 1908, the trustees formally founded the Reed Institute, also known as Reed College. Articles of incorporation were filed on June 27.
Thomas Lamb Eliot had been raised in an educational environment. His father, Rev. William Eliot, was the founder of Washington University in St. Louis, from which Thomas graduated in the first class. An outspoken social progressive, Thomas Eliot embraced the new educational theories of John Dewey, who viewed the development of knowledge as an adaptive human response to environmental conditions aimed at actively restructuring those conditions. Eliot envisioned a new type of college that radically departed from the traditional model in its intellectual seriousness and its goal of fostering social change in Portland.
The trustees worked to find a site, hire staff, and develop architectural plans. They appointed A.E. Doyle as the lead architect for the first buildings.
Reed in 1908