The Johnston Gate was completed in 1889 after a Georgian Revival design by McKim, Mead, and White, it opens onto Peabody Street (often mistaken for Massachusetts Avenue, from which Peabody Street diverges nearby) just north of Harvard Square. Costing some $10,000, it was the gift of Samuel Johnston (Harvard College class of 1855). Each Harvard Commencement Day for several hundred years, the sheriffs of Middlesex and Suffolk Counties have arrived at Harvard Yard on horseback, preparatory to the Middlesex Sheriff's ritual calling of the celebrants to order. It has become traditional for them to enter via the Johnston Gate.[2][3]
Tablets flanking the gate's exterior
Class of 1874 Gate
Class of 1870 Gate
Class of 1886 Gate
North
Class of 1881 Gate
The inscription on the Class of 1881 Gate invites the reader to "come within its gates, in order that in whole-hearted service to the truth, they may enter into life and so be free".[4] It has been locked for many years.[5][6]
Class of 1876 (Holworthy) Gate
The Class of 1876 Gate is also known as Holworthy Gate; Holworthy Hall, a freshman dormitory, is immediately inside it. A plaque at its apex reads, "In Memory of Dear Old Times."[7][8]
I went to the College Jubillee on the 8th instant. A noble& well thought of anniversary. The pathos of the occasion was extreme& not much noted by the speakers. Cambridge at any time is full of ghosts; but on that day the anointed eye saw the crowd of spirits that mingled with the procession in the vacant spaces, year by year, as the classes proceeded; and then the far longer train of ghosts that followed the Company, of the men that wore before us the college honors& the laurels of the state – the long winding train reaching back into eternity.
Bradstreet Gate
Bradstreet Gate is a wrought-iron gate across Quicny Stree and Cambridge Street from Memorial Hall.[14] In 1997 it was dedicated to Anne Bradstreet on the 25th anniversary of female students living in Harvard's freshman dormitories.[15][16][17] A plaque with a quote from one of Bradstreet's poems was added in 2003.[18]
Classes of 1887 and 1888 Gate
Fire Station Gate
East
Robinson Gate
Class of 1885 Gate
Emerson Gate
Class of 1908 (Eliot) Gate
Loeb House Gate
17 Quincy Drive Gate
Dudley Memorial Gate
South and southwest
Class of 1880 (Bacon) Gate
Class of 1890 (Dexter) Gate
Class of 1877 (Morgan) Gate
Class of 1889 Gate
Porcellian Club (McKean) Gate
Class of 1857 Gate
The 1857 Gate (or Class of 1857 Gate) is a triple-arched gate which Harvard Magazine called "a very touching memorial to the unbroken bonds of friendship that this class had" despite the fact that its members had fought on both sides of the American Civil War.[19] Students on both sides helped fund the gate.[20] It has a Latin inscription from Horace's Odes.[further explanation needed][21][22]