SAN FRANCISCO (Bloomberg) — Jane Stanford wanted the university she and her husband founded to boast a campus as grand as that of Harvard, Yale or Cambridge, with neoclassical buildings similar to those seen in Europe.

In 1902, a centerpiece of that dream began to rise: the country's largest gymnasium, with towering stone columns, a marble entrance and a glass dome.

"They thought if they built that building, it would stand for 500 years," said Stanford University archeologist Laura Jones.

In 1906, the gymnasium, a library and museum annex, all built by Jane Stanford, were in ruins, leveled by the great earthquake that struck San Francisco. A century later, the California college is trying to solve the mystery of why the buildings designed for posterity had crumbled.

Since last fall, a team of archaeologists and students has been excavating the ruins of the gymnasium for clues. On the first public tour of the site last week, a crowd of 30 gathered around a dusty hole to stare at the top of a granite block that hasn't been exposed since the builders slathered it with grout more than a century ago.

The dig, now 12 feet (3.7 meters) deep, is giving Stanford archeological students a chance to practice field techniques, and prepares them for larger sites around the world when they graduate, said Jones, 46, whose official title is Director of Heritage Services and University Archaeologist.

"This is the biggest ruin I have ever excavated," said Jones, who worked on her first dig in 1984. "You would have to go to Mexico City or Rome to find something of this size."

The team is looking for evidence of shoddy construction and materials, blamed by some at the time for the gymnasium's collapse. The university's architect, Charles Hodges, resigned after the quake.

Jane Stanford's critics, including the university president, David Starr Jordan, accused her of rushing the project to try to fulfill her late husband's goals for the campus. Leland Stanford died in 1893 at the age of 69.

"The new library, gymnasium and museum annex, crushed like a pie set on edge, we have no feeling for," Jordan said in a speech after the earthquake. "They have kept us impoverished for long, tedious years."

The gymnasium alone cost $500,000, Margaret Kimball, the university archivist, said. That's about $12.4 million in today's dollars.

The facility, whose interior was being finished when the earthquake struck, was about as long as a football field (91 meters) and more than half as wide, enclosing 2.3 acres (0.9 hectares) of floor space, according to a university report a year before the earthquake.

It had bowling alleys, a pool, a ballroom, handball courts, rooms for fencing, boxing and wrestling, and an adjacent covered quarter-mile (400-meter) track.

When the earthquake hit, the gymnasium's walls buckled, the roof caved in, and the sandstone facades peeled off, Jones said.

As she peered into the hole last week, Jones spotted a critical design flaw. The building's concrete foundation wasn't anchored to the structure with steel, as is the practice now.

"They're just big dumb slabs of cement," she said. "We have steel in the building, but clearly it's not bolted to the building or foundation."

Subsequent examination may provide more hints. For example, was the concrete mixed to proper standards? "We will test it to see if it was particularly poor," Jones said.

Jane Stanford didn't see the gymnasium completed, nor did she see it collapse. She died in 1905 at the age of 76, under circumstances that also posed a mystery.

An autopsy at the time suggested she was poisoned by strychnine, according to the 2003 book, "The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford," by a Stanford University physician, Robert Culter. A doctor recruited by Jordan, the university president, disputed that, arguing she had died of heart failure, the cause stated in medical documents.

The destruction of the earthquake forever altered the look of Stanford. Future buildings were done in the simple, square lines of the mission style, away from the neoclassical motif of the Stanfords' grand design.