So you thought your campus housing was bad!
A century ago, Stanford students had few housing choices. If they couldn't afford Encina Hall or didn't want to put up with its “cold soup, tough dry meat and continual prunes” they found rooms off campus or with faculty families. Some “rugged individualists” chose to live in the cheap, ramshackle barracks behind the Quad and the power house, on the site of today's Old Union. Vacated by workmen who constructed the Inner Quad in the late 1880s, the “Camp” became the home to those who defied the stigma of poverty. Mock Chong's restaurant on site provided simple but plentiful food. The Camp might have been considered an intellectual ghetto by the student body of those days, but scholarship among Camp residents ranked higher than that of Encina or the fraternities. Six successive editors of the literary magazine Sequoia lived there and by 1899 its residents had received nine of 11 campus first prizes for poetry and fiction. The Bohemian atmosphere also produced “Brookfarm,” a coeducational club of campus literary figures. The Camp was demolished in 1902 (The steeple of Memorial Church and the smokestack of the university powerhouse, located not far from the old camp buildings, were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.)
