About this time last year, I wrote a post about the 50th anniversary of DuPre Residence Hall. DuPre and its close relative, Shipp Residence Hall, were both built as part of a campus expansion plan developed in the late 1950s. This plan included the construction of Milliken Science Hall, the renovation of Main Building, the opening of the Black Music-Art Building, and two new residence halls.
A. M. Shipp Hall, opened in September 1963, represented the culmination of this plan. Built to house 168 students, it was slightly larger than its sibling across the lawn. It included a nice lounge area that has been a popular meeting place, an apartment for a house mother, and two interior courtyards. As in DuPre, students were housed in rooms with individual sleeping and studying rooms, which students came to call “cubes.”
The Board of Trustees decided to follow a tradition just before the dorm opened and name it in honor of a former president of the college, in this case, the college’s second president, Albert Micajah Shipp. President Shipp served from 1859 to 1875. When the residence hall was formally opened in October 1963, several of his grandchildren were in attendance.
Shipp is special to me personally since I lived there for three years. In 1991, with the opening of the dorm that is now known as Carlisle Hall (the New Dorm for those of us 1990s alums), most of the women in the senior and junior classes decamped from Shipp. That made Shipp available for junior and senior men, and in my case, the occasional sophomore. I never lived anywhere else. And, though it may be a stereotype that women take better care of their residence halls than men, in this case, it was probably accurate. Having been the home of women students for years, Shipp was in really good shape. I did notice that after three years, it was looking a little less so.
Along with DuPre, Shipp was thoroughly renovated a few summers ago, and continues to serve another generation of students.
Photos – a Shipp postcard, construction photos, the dedication program.
