You might say that Ithaca College began with a letter from Berlin. Ithaca-area native William Grant Egbert -- Will to his friends -- was a young, homesick violinist studying in Europe when it occurred to him that the best way to live at home and still make a living would be to do what he did best. He could play his violin, and do it in Ithaca, if he taught music on a grander scale. So he wrote a letter to an Ithaca friend, instructing him to sell $50 shares in a new conservatory of music. There weren't many takers.

Nonetheless, on September 19, 1892, the first students trooped into four rented rooms in a house on East Seneca Street to begin their lessons. On that first evening, the faculty of the Ithaca Conservatory of Music gave a free concert in the Unitarian Church, the beginning of a tradition of public performances. Conservatory officers busily set about finding boarding -- "places carefully selected among Christian families" -- for their new students, who studied everything from solfeggio and composition to guitar, mandolin, and even china painting.

For years the fledgling Ithaca Conservatory of Music rented space in the old Wilgus Opera House above Rothschild's Department Store, where Center Ithaca stands today. But by 1910 the management of the school longed for permanent quarters. On November 1, 1910, the directors authorized taking out a mortgage of $11,400 to purchase Judge Douglass Boardman's handsome Italianate townhouse at 120 East Buffalo Street, adjoining DeWitt Park.