Deconstructing Herrin Hall and Herrin Labs

The venerable Herrin Hall and Herrin Laboratory buildings, constructed in the early 1960s and home to Stanford’s Department of Biology for many years, have come to the end of their useful lives. Biology laboratories are now largely housed in the more modern Gilbert Biological Sciences and Bass Biology Research buildings (opened in 1987 and 2018, respectively).

Herrin Hall and Labs are being demolished and the site cleared to make way for a new Data Science and Computation Complex. This change offers an opportunity to remember and acknowledge William F. Herrin, for whom the biology buildings were named. 

In the 1910s and 1920s, Mr. Herrin served as vice president, chief counsel, and political manager for the Southern Pacific Railroad and was a personal friend of Governor Leland Stanford. It has been reported that “the Southern Pacific, led by land agent B. A. McAllaster and chief counsel William F. Herrin, headed a coalition of regional groups in blocking the U.S. Reclamation Service from building a large dam on the Truckee River and converting Lake Tahoe into a vast storage reservoir to soothe the thirst of the faltering Truckee-Carson Reclamation Project in western Nevada.”