Again, the Encyclopedia of Union College History provides a view of a time unimaginably long gone: when cows grazed on the campus pasture. Before the current West College was built in 1953, the campus was open to the west, and the lands west of the wall were called the Pasture.
Professors long had the right to keep a cow in the Pasture, a benefit which has received attention proportionate only to its quaintness. The disadvantages of owning a cow, especially in a Schenectady winter, and especially for the dignified, were manifold; most faculty members must have found it simpler to buy the dairy products they needed. Only professors Nott, Lewis, Jackson and Pearson availed themselves of the grazing privilege in 1852; Pearson gave it up by 1854 and Lewis by 1857.
There were times when no cows grazed in the Pasture, but most of the “large number of cattle” an 1865 visitor saw there must have belonged to townspeople who had paid a grazing fee; twenty years later, all the cattle fell into this category.
The cows’ various owners had to expect them to be the targets of nocturnal raids by students, who milked them, painted them with zebra-stripes, and sometimes led them into classrooms or even second-floor dormitory rooms . . .
The departure of the last faculty cow was probably ensured in June 1907 when the Board of Trustees’ Instruction Committee authorized the president to “offer to Professor Landreth an increase of $250 in his annual salary with the understanding that Professor Landreth’s cow shall disappear from the college campus.”
There was, however, at least one more instance when the Pasture was a pasture. At the suggestion of Marian Osgood Fox, wife of the college president, trustees bought five Shropshire sheep, which turned into eighteen sheep. “When not harried by dogs or teased by students, the animals picturesquely cropped the grass; they wintered on a farm in Rexford.”
The Pasture was once considerably larger, but Union College periodically sold off lots. Alumni tried to convince the city to lease the land for a park around 1900, but were not successful. The college sold off 44 lots fronting Park Place in 1901, and the city bought the lot on which it built its library (now Webster House).
During World War II, American Locomotive Co. leased the Pasture and used it for employee parking, and even parked tanks on the south end.
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