/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/cb/f5/cbf53a8f-ab25-4f04-9809-58da970031e4/2026-07_jane_gc-4-web.jpg)
Stanford University’s Founding Matriarch Was a Travel-Loving Philanthropist Who Met a Tragic End. A New Exhibition Explores Her Life, Grief and Death by Poison
Jane Stanford’s legacy is the focus of a new showcase at the California university. The display features artifacts that have never previously been exhibited
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/IMG_7600-edit-v2.png)
:focal(1500x1000:1501x1001)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/cb/f5/cbf53a8f-ab25-4f04-9809-58da970031e4/2026-07_jane_gc-4-web.jpg)
In 1884, the philanthropist Jane Stanford experienced heartbreak that would change her life forever.
While vacationing in Europe, Jane’s only child, Leland Stanford Jr., contracted typhoid and died at 15. Jane and her husband, Leland Stanford, decided to memorialize their son by founding a university in his honor. Commonly known as Stanford University, the California school’s official name is the Leland Stanford Junior University.
From Jane’s point of view, says Isabelle Rogers, an assistant registrar at the university’s Cantor Arts Center, “they didn’t have a child anymore, and so she thought that all of California could be her children.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/04/9d/049d1eb9-1c67-4577-a6ff-562c1f7bc7e4/mosaic.png)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/c5/92/c5920bad-a7a1-405a-998e-8eb181e8a40b/jls14897_cdp-pub_angel.jpg)
A new exhibition exploring Jane’s legacy is on view at the Cantor through May 18, 2028. Titled “Jane!,” the show focuses on its namesake’s grief over the loss of her son, her philanthropic efforts, her love of travel and collecting artifacts, and her mysterious death from strychnine poisoning in 1905.
Originally called the Leland Stanford Jr. Museum, the arts center opened its doors in 1894, three years after Stanford University began offering classes. Exhibition curator Patrick R. Crowley says that the center was designed to resemble the facade of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the city where Leland Jr. first fell ill. The teenager “was completely enamored with all of this architecture and antiquities that he was seeing when they went to Greece together,” the curator explains.
Leland Jr. wanted to be a collector and curator and eventually open a museum of his own. After his death, his parents “took his collection and built off of it, and that is what the founding collection of the Cantor is,” Rogers says.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/91/19/911943c8-65db-4727-8472-c9a7c4d406a0/jls18217_cdp-pub_portrait.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/37/65/3765fd26-99f1-41ce-adf4-f98e9202dd97/leland.jpg)
Jane was born in 1828 into a large family in Albany. She married Leland, who was then working as a lawyer, in 1850. Leland amassed a fortune in the railroad industry before serving first as the governor of California and later as a senator for the state.
Fun fact: Leland Stanford and the transcontinental railroad
On May 10, 1869, Leland—then-president of the Central Pacific Railroad—drove the ceremonial gold spike that marked the completion of the first transcontinental railroad.Several of the artifacts featured in “Jane!” have never been publicly displayed before. “There are some objects in there that are works by well-known artists, but then there are also some really strange, bizarre family heirlooms and keepsakes,” Crowley says in a statement. Items on view include a painting of Jane’s jewel collection, ceramics depicting Leland Jr.’s last meal (bacon, eggs and toast), and death masks for both Jane and Leland Jr.
The show seeks to emphasize that there are “still a lot of wonderful things in life, even when you’re in mourning,” Rogers says. After her son’s death, Jane embraced Spiritualism, a religious movement that suggested the living could commune with the dead, as a way of coping with the loss.
In Stanford’s gallery spaces, much of the information presented about the university’s co-founders centers on Leland. The new exhibition, in contrast, focuses on the school’s founding matriarch, a woman whom Crowley describes in the statement as “so formidable, peculiar and unexpectedly human.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/41/6e/416e4309-595b-4fe7-9232-bd9aa2cbb6ba/199153_gilhooly_breakfast-2.jpg)
Jane viewed herself “as a woman embedded in a family and with these responsibilities to her family,” says Laura Jones, director of Stanford’s heritage services and the official university archaeologist. She and Leland “started out with very little wealth, and they developed massive wealth and power and influence. And she learned about that alongside him.”
After Leland died in 1893, Jane was left to oversee the university largely on her own. At the time, it was rare for a woman to wield such control over an institution of higher learning. But Jones emphasizes that the university wasn’t just Leland’s idea; it was the couple’s shared vision. Jane “was prepared as a widow to take on that role of making the decisions” about Stanford’s future, Jones says.
The artifacts showcased in the exhibition are set against the backdrop of Jane’s death under still-unresolved circumstances. As Stanford historian Richard White wrote in his 2022 book, Who Killed Jane Stanford?, accounts of Jane’s poisoning were “often conveyed in breathless coverage by the city’s newspapers.” They “overlapped, changed over time and were full of contradictions, and that is their virtue. They map attempts to explain, deceive and justify.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/02/5e/025e7bc9-d982-4807-883e-68ec359fb6a1/jls16294_cooper_jewels.jpg)
The sources generally agree that Jane was at home in her San Francisco mansion on January 14, 1905, when she started vomiting after taking a sip of mineral water. Her personal maid and her secretary were the only other people in the house at the time. A chemist’s report later confirmed that the water had been laced with strychnine, a commercial poison used to kill rats.
Frightened by the attempt on her life, Jane fled San Francisco. En route to Japan, she stopped in Hawaii, where she died in agony after taking bicarbonate of soda as a digestive aid. Although an autopsy detected evidence of fatal strychnine poisoning, Stanford’s then-president, David Starr Jordan, rejected the finding and told the press that Jane had died of heart failure. Jordan’s version of events remained the accepted narrative for nearly a century, until scholars Robert W.P. Cutler and W.B. Carnochan revisited the story in the early 2000s.
The two main suspects in Jane’s death were Jordan, who had repeatedly clashed with her over Stanford’s management, and her personal secretary, Bertha Berner, the only person present during both the San Francisco and Hawaii poisonings. Based on his extensive research into the case, White argues that Berner killed Jane, perhaps to claim the money left to her in the philanthropist’s will. Jordan, meanwhile, “covered up the crime” as an “accessory after the fact,” White writes, either to avoid embarrassing the university or to deflect suspicion from himself.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/f0/64/f06487cd-cc02-4aa1-9887-82d1b0d588a9/3840px-statue_of_stanford_family.jpg)
The Cantor exhibition includes objects linked to both suspects. One is a set of plaster hands that were initially mislabeled as Jane’s but later determined to belong to Jordan. The other is a mosaic painting of Berner that had long been forgotten in the attic of a house near Stanford’s campus.
Jane’s death and the tragedies she endured during her lifetime are only part of her story.
“She’s huge as a philanthropist, and she doesn’t really get … recognized for that,” Jones says. “People talk all the time now at Stanford about ‘founders.’ All our students want to found something or build something. And she really is our prototype.”
“Jane!” is on view at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University through May 28, 2028.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/IMG_7600-edit-v2.png)