The Last Commencement: Dr. Jesse F. Millspaugh

There are certain documents that seem to hold a silence of their own. The paper softens, the ink fades, yet the gravity of what it once represented remains.

The Exercises of Graduation, Summer Class of Nineteen Sixteen at the Los Angeles State Normal School is one such artifact. Folded along its original crease, faintly tinted with time, it lists the names of students and faculty who stood at the threshold of a new century of learning. Among them appears Dr. Jesse F. Millspaugh, printed for the last time as president of the institution he had shaped for more than a decade.

To hold this program today is to hold the close of an era.

It was June 22, 1916, and beneath the soft heat of a Los Angeles afternoon, the final class under Millspaugh’s leadership crossed the stage of the newly built Vermont Avenue campus. Within days, he would retire from public service. Newspapers across California acknowledged his departure with reverence, calling him “the clear-sighted educator who guided the school with wisdom, sanity, and force.”

Under his direction, the Los Angeles State Normal School had evolved from its modest beginnings at Fifth and Grand into one of the most forward-thinking teacher-training institutions in the country.

The campus he envisioned was not only functional but symbolic, built of brick, column, and corridor to reflect his belief in what education should represent: civic purpose, architectural order, and enduring spirit. To Dr. Millspaugh, a school was not merely a place of instruction but a moral design, created to cultivate both intellect and citizenship. The symmetry of the façade, the rhythm of its arches, and the measured geometry of its halls expressed his conviction that beauty and discipline could exist together, that even architecture could teach. In this way, the campus became a living expression of continuity and care.

A century later, the same ideals that guided Millspaugh’s design live quietly in the work of Acanthus Home. The preservation of this program, its paper softened and its folds still holding the memory of a student’s hand, mirrors the care we bring to heirloom restoration. Both acts are gestures of reverence, ensuring that beauty, integrity, and human intention remain legible across time. Restoration, too, is a kind of architecture, one built not from brick but from memory, proportion, and the quiet intention to preserve what deserves to endure. Just as Dr. Millspaugh shaped a campus to reflect the ideals of learning, we shape heirlooms to reflect the endurance of meaning. Both seek permanence not in the object itself but in the values they carry forward.

Dr. Millspaugh’s career traced the movement of American education westward. Born in Michigan, he served as president of the Winona Normal School in Minnesota before leading public education in Salt Lake City, where he introduced reforms that taught moral values alongside academic excellence. When he arrived in Los Angeles in 1904 to assume the presidency of the Normal School, the city was young, ambitious, and searching for an identity rooted in intellect as much as industry.

In his addresses, he often spoke of what he called “the architecture of citizenship.” He believed that education itself was a form of design, not of structures in stone, but of conscience and civic character. In his 1916 address, Preparedness Is Graduation Theme, he reminded students that “the real patriot lives for his country.” To him, the courage of the classroom mattered more than the courage of the battlefield. Teaching, in his view, was an act of preservation, shaping the moral framework of the nation from within.

The Vermont Avenue campus embodied that ideal. It was arranged not unlike a civic plaza, a democratic space of open sightlines and proportion. In 1914 the main building was named Millspaugh Hall in recognition of his vision. Two years later, as his final class graduated, the structure stood complete, the architectural echo of his philosophy rendered in stone and sunlight.

The 1916 graduation program now serves as both record and relic. Within its pages, the graduating class represents a cross-section of early twentieth-century Los Angeles: young women trained in art, literature, music, and domestic science, and men preparing for civic administration, manual training, and public service. Each name was a beginning. Among them was my great-grandmother, one of the last students to graduate under Dr. Millspaugh’s leadership. Her presence in that list bridges the private and the public, the intimate and the institutional. It connects my own lineage to the founding era of higher learning in California, to a moment when education, like restoration, was an act of faith in the future.

Dr. Millspaugh retired quietly that summer. His health was declining, yet his influence continued to resonate through those he had taught and inspired. The following year the school formally joined the University of California system, becoming its Southern Branch in 1919. The transformation of the Los Angeles State Normal School into UCLA was, in every sense, a continuation of his work, the architectural and intellectual foundation upon which modern education in Los Angeles was built. Today, the site where Millspaugh Hall once stood is part of the Los Angeles City College campus at 855 North Vermont Avenue, a few miles east of UCLA’s present location in Westwood. Though the original hall was demolished in the 1960s, the land remains a quiet testament to the early architecture of learning that shaped the city’s academic landscape.

When he passed away in 1920, former students and faculty gathered to honor his life’s work. They spoke of him not only as an administrator but as an architect of moral thought, a builder of frameworks both tangible and unseen. His portrait, painted by William Cogswell in 1896 and once thought lost, was rediscovered years later in the sealed tower of Millspaugh Hall. The rediscovery itself felt symbolic, a reminder that memory has a way of returning to light.

For Acanthus Home, this document holds meaning beyond its historical value. It embodies the principle on which our atelier is founded: that the material world carries the imprint of the human spirit. The folds of a graduation program, like the grain of a walnut cabinet or the worn carving of a chair, preserve the gestures of their makers and the intentions of their age. To restore is not to erase the past but to give it continuity. Just as a nineteenth-century settee can be renewed to live within a modern interior, this century-old program continues to speak through the hands that preserved it.

The last commencement of Dr. Jesse F. Millspaugh is, in this sense, both an end and a beginning, a testament to the inheritance of knowledge, care, and form that defines the story of Los Angeles itself. Within this fragile piece of paper lives a lineage of learning, and within that lineage, a personal thread that ties memory to material, family to foundation.

And among the names printed there, each a story waiting to be rediscovered, are the beginnings of future journals, an invitation to follow these lives outward, to learn who they became and what traces they left behind.

Archival Note

The 1916 Los Angeles State Normal School commencement program featured here marks the final year of Dr. Jesse F. Millspaugh’s presidency. His tenure from 1904 to 1916 oversaw the construction of the Vermont Avenue campus, later integrated into the University of California system as UCLA. Millspaugh Hall, dedicated in his honor, commemorated his contribution to education in California and to the moral architecture of learning that defined the Progressive Era.

At Acanthus Home, we continue the quiet work of preservation that began more than a century ago. To explore our restored heirlooms and the stories they carry, visit the Heirloom Design Journal or our current collection.