It didn’t snow in Spartanburg last night, but I understand that a lot of places on the east coast got more than a few flakes.
For those of you who got snow, and even for those of us that didn’t, here’s a photo of a snow-covered Main Building from the late 1940s.
Here’s a picture of Main Building, with the narrow steps and several trees, from 1930.
There are more photos like this on the Archives flickr stream.
Here’s what the college looked like fifty years ago this winter, in 1963.
Main Building is, of course, in the top center section, as are the original houses on either side of it. The “old library” – now the Daniel Building, and the original section of Milliken Science Hall are across from Main. DuPre Residence Hall, which was brand new, and Shipp Residence Hall, then under construction, are to the right of (behind) Main. Greene Hall is next to Daniel, and Andrews Field House is across from Greene.
A number of other buildings are gone – Wightman Hall, Snyder Hall, the old ROTC building, and the old canteen (all at the top edge of the picture) and Carlisle Hall (at the bottom.)
And, of course, there are plenty of buildings that have been constructed since 1963.
You can see more aerial photos of campus on the Archives Flickr Page.
Today, a few campus postcards from the early 20th century made their way across my desk. These images are of the Cleveland Science Hall, constructed in 1904, of Carlisle Hall, constructed in 1912, and the buildings of the Wofford Fitting School, which were built between 1888 and 1904.
It’s always nice to get new (old) items, and even nicer when I can share them with interested readers. Out of all these buildings, only Alumni Hall, the center building in the top photo, is still standing and in use. It’s where the Admission and Financial Aid offices are today.
Last week’s question – what building was this, got several correct guesses. Or more likely, most of you simply remembered exactly what it was.
Alumni from the end of World War II through the early 1980s would have called it the ROTC Building. Older alumni would have called it the Fitting School’s Recitation Hall. Both would be correct.
Originally constructed in 1905-06 for Wofford’s Fitting School (a preparatory school operated by the college to ensure a qualified freshman class), the building opened in 1906 as a classroom building. In part, it replaced space lost in the Fitting School’s original building when the top two floors were destroyed by a fire in 1901. (That building survived, and minus its original top floors, continues to serve as Wofford’s offices of Admission and Financial Aid.) The Fitting School had experienced significant growth in the early 20th century, and needed to expand its housing and classroom space. The Recitation Hall was strictly for classrooms, which allowed classroom space in the other two buildings to become residential space. (The other building later served a generation of college students as a dorm – Snyder Hall.)
When the Fitting School closed, the college’s YMCA chapter took over the building, and when they evolved into the Student Christian Association, they used the building until World War II. Many of the campus’s annual religious week services as well as weeknight events were held there. Finally, the college’s ROTC detachment took over the building in 1943 and used it until it was demolished in 1985 to make way for the Papadopoulos Building complex. By then, the building had no doubt seen better days.
This building was demolished in the 1980s. Can you identify it? What was it originally? Which department used it in its later years? Where was it on campus?
Fifty years is a pretty long life for a college dormitory. But this fall, the A. Mason DuPre Residence Hall turns 50
In February 1961, the college announced plans to build two new residence halls on the north side of Main Building. Main was then undergoing renovations itself, and the administration wanted to create a “mall” surrounded by Main and two new residence halls. The college could also see the potential for baby boom enrollment growth, and new residence halls would allow for modest growth in the student body, up to about 1,000 students.
With the approval of Spartanburg City Council, the college acquired Cleveland Street, which ran directly behind Main Building, and moved forward with construction. They broke ground on Tuesday, September 5, 1961. The building was designed by the Boston architectural firm Perry, Shaw, Hepburn, and Dean. It was a different design that many previous residence halls, as it was the first on campus to have the “cube” style where each student had a separate sleeping and study room. The little rooms shared a larger sitting room, and several rooms together shared a series of small hall bathrooms. Paid for with federal loans, the dorm was budgeted at about $582,000. The cost was ultimately $750,000.
In the spring of 1962, the college announced that the project would be named in memory of Dean A. Mason DuPre, who had been the college’s first dean. Dean DuPre graduated from Wofford in 1895 and worked for over fifty years on the campus. Named dean in 1920, he was also acting president in the 1920-21 school year when President Henry Nelson Snyder was involved with the Methodist Educational Campaign.
The college contracted with Dean DuPre’s cousin, the noted artist Grace Annette DuPre, to paint a portrait of Mason DuPre to hang in the new residence hall’s lobby.
DuPre Hall opened for the fall semester of 1962 and was formally dedicated during Homecoming that fall.
Over the years, DuPre has had its share of ups and downs. For many years, it was the senior male residence hall, and it quickly became the scene of pranks and occasional vandalism. The DuPre clipping file has several mentions of discharged fire extinguishers and trash strewn about the halls. Perhaps the nadir of DuPre was in the early 1990s, when it became a tradition (?) for the seniors to rip out ceiling tiles on Commencement weekend. In 1993, student leadership in DuPre worked very hard to end this dubious custom. In the summer of 2011, DuPre and its neighbor across the mall, Shipp, were completely renovated, and the dorm became more comfortable and energy efficient. With that renovation, perhaps DuPre will be around for another half century.
Photos from the DuPre Residence Hall file, college archives.
Saturday, May 5 marks the 20th anniversary of the dedication of the Franklin W. Olin Building. The building opened in February 1992, though it was not 100% complete, and so the formal dedication, with fairly elaborate ceremonies, took place near the end of the spring.
For those of us who have been around the college for a while, it’s hard to believe that twenty years have passed. And it’s hard to remember what a big deal the Olin Foundation grant was at the time, and what a game-changer the building was for the college.
Before Olin, we didn’t really have much in the way of educational technology. Most of our classrooms were pretty old-fashioned, with old desks, chalkboards, and for the most part, the rooms were all the same shade of off-white. The Olin Building was colorful (most of us were unfamiliar with peach, salmon, light blue, and lavender classrooms!), the desks and chairs were modern, and many of the rooms had video presenters, whiteboards, and lots more computers. The teaching theater, with its long desks and comfortable chairs, quickly became a popular meeting space. Olin replaced other places on campus where students wanted to study, and its computer labs were a considerable improvement over the old VAX lab in Main.
The Olin Foundation had rejected our initial grant request, prompting the college to refine and articulate its vision in a year-long planning process. They liked what they had encouraged us to do, and in 1989, awarded us a $5.5 million grant for this building, which was to house Wofford’s foreign languages, mathematics, computer science, and education departments. Information technology would be in the building as well. Other departments later moved to the building. Dr. B. G. Stephens managed much of the building’s planning and early use.
The college, with the leadership of Dr. Larry McGehee, planned a series of events to celebrate the building’s dedication. The dedication itself, held on the lawn in front of the building, featured representatives of the Olin Foundation, the campus, and the community. Four local fourth-graders, who would be potential members of Wofford’s class of 2004, were invited to cut the ribbon, and the college commissioned a work of music, the F. W. Olin Overture, to commemorate the occasion. The Olin Foundation folks told the college that they’d never had a musical work written for them before. I can say, from my readings in college records, that Larry McGehee was thinking about and planning the festivities a year in advance, and it set a pattern for really nice campus celebratory events in years to come.
As part of the festivities, the college hosted a symposium where 15 leaders in education and other fields talked about the liberal arts college’s mission, technology, and the role of the liberal arts in a good society. The symposium was recorded and later broadcast on South Carolina Educational Television.
I remember marching in the procession to the Olin Building for the dedication as a sophomore, and I remember the excitement that came with dedicating a very forward-looking addition to the campus. I also remember taking a class in the teaching theater in its first semester. It is hard to believe that there was a time that Olin was the newest and best thing on campus, but it’s important to remember that it was just the first of many steps toward creating a better Wofford.
So it turns out, I missed an anniversary last year.
Greene Hall, the oldest residence hall on the campus, turned 60 in the fall of 2010. For some reason, I convinced myself that the venerable old dorm opened in 1951, but a check of the Walter Kirkland Greene Residence Hall file proved me wrong.
Its total construction cost was $350,000. The college didn’t pay off the debt on the building until 1957.
With the construction of Wightman Hall in 1957-58, the area that had been the canteen (the west wing of the basement of Greene) was converted into classrooms and faculty offices. The building housed offices until the opening of the Daniel Building in 1972. Some faculty offices remained in the Greene basement for two or three more years. (Thanks to Dr. Vivian Fisher for the correction!)
Several articles in the Old Gold and Black note the continuing problem with vandalism in Greene during the 1970s.
Constant fire alarms, turning the fire hose on in the lobby, broken windows, ripping doors off of their hinges were making the dorm unlivable. The college moved to add partitions in the hallways, making them shorter, and also considered making it an all-freshman dorm. (Remember all of the resident students were men in the early 1970s.) And, in the fall of 1976, the college let Greene residents loose with gallons of paint, allowing them to make whatever non-structural changes they wished. The college wanted to make Greene a “different kind of dorm.” Dorm supervisor Jim Hackney said the results were “better than I expected.”
Greene has had a few other renovations over the years – including adding air conditioning in the late 1980s, and renovating the ground floor “dungeon” into better housing. But it has always been the most “home-y” of all of the residence halls on campus.
Photos, from top to bottom: Groundbreaking in October 1949, Greene under construction on January 1, 1950, and nearing completion on September 1, 1950. All photos from the archives.
After a summer full of paper processing, scanning collections, and answering reference questions, with a little vacation thrown in during August, and my annual trip to the Society of American Archivists, we’re pack in the swing of things here at the college.
Obviously, the archives blog took a little hiatus during the last 8 or 9 weeks, which I regret. But, that seems to happen about every summer.
Nevertheless, things were busy, and I hope to roll out a few digital collections for you, my faithful readers, over the next few weeks. I will try to highlight a few of the projects we worked on this summer, feature a few Wofford indiviauals, and talk about some college traditions. And always, as interesting things come across my desk, I’ll share them.
Today, I’m sharing an album of campus photos from the 1929-30 school year. Many of these pictures appeared in the yearbook that year, and I used a few of them in my Wofford pictorial history that I wrote last year. (Copies are still available if you haven’t gotten yours!)
Here is a link to the pictures. Click to play the slide show, or to go look at the photos on Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com//photos/wofford_archives/sets/72157627107392443/show/