By William “Skip” Deegans
Shown above is a circa 1895 photo of Greenbrier County’s Tom Williams. The son of Albert and Elizabeth Williams, he grew up on a farm near Meadow Bluff. Williams enrolled in California’s Stanford University in 1893. He was one of Stanford’s earliest students as it opened as a coeducational university in 1891. Obviously bright, Williams was selected during his second year by Stanford’s president and zoologist, Dr. David Starr Jordan, to accompany Jordan on an exhibition to Mexico to collect zoological specimens. Initially, the project had not been successful. However, in an 1897 letter to The Greenbrier Independent, T. A. Lewis wrote that Williams “came forward as the hero of the hour.” He developed the confidence of the Mexicans and Indians who guided them during their three-month trip to many valuable discoveries.
Williams stood out not only in the classroom, but also on the football field where he was a star lineman for the Stanford Cardinals. In 1896, the Stanford team defeated their arch rival, the University of California at Berkeley, 20-0 in a game The San Francisco Call And Post described as the “greatest multitude of spectators that ever assembled in the far West to view an outdoor athletic contest.”
After graduating from Stanford, Williams receive his medical degree from New York’s Columbia College of Physicians in 1901. He returned to Palo Alto, California, in 1904 and became one of the city’s first physicians. He was active in Stanford affairs his whole life and was instrumental in the construction of its football stadium in 1923. He died in Palo Alto in 1947.
Photo courtesy of Stanford University.
Sources: The Greenbrier Independent, The San Francisco Call and Post, New York Times, San Francisco Examiner.