Category: Buildings

I paid a visit to Kensington Mansion in Eastover, in the lower part of Richland County last Tuesday with a group of Methodist travelers from St. James and Bethel United Methodist churches here in Spartanburg.  Seeing Kensington, which is an enormous brick house near the Wateree River, reminded me of Edward C. Jones, who designed the house, Main Building, and many other homes, churches, and public buildings in South Carolina and Tennessee.

Whatever you can say about some of the decisions of
Wofford’s founding Board of Trustees, it would be hard to criticize their
selection of Edward C. Jones to design Main Building.  They picked Jones, a Charleston architect,
just as he was rising in reputation. 

Jones was born in Charleston in 1822.  His parents were not wealthy, and in fact,
one biography notes that their financial troubles forced him to become
self-sufficient at an early age.  His
guardian, who was his half-brother, did not want him to become an architect,
which he felt called to do after a pair of fires in Charleston in the 1830s, because
he felt that architects were merely mechanics, not artists.  The growing professionalization of architecture
by the 1840s, however, made Jones’ move more respectable.  He studied by reading and serving as an
apprentice to John Long.  His first solo
work was the Glebe Street Presbyterian Church, in the new Harleston Village
section of Charleston.  The antebellum
growth of the Holy City northward along the peninsula between the Ashley and
Cooper rivers brought a boom in new construction, and the residents of these
newer neighborhoods wanted churches to attend.
In the 1840s, Jones designed or remodeled three Presbyterian
churches.  His success launched his
career, he received commissions to design a number of other public buildings,
such as Roper Hospital, the South Carolina Railroad Terminal, and Magnolia
Cemetery. 

In the 1850s, Jones began to design in the Italianate, or
Tuscan Villa, style.  This allowed him
more flexibility than strictly Greek, Roman, or Gothic styles, which also
allowed the buildings being designed to be more adaptive to their environment
and planned use.  No doubt Jones came to
the attention of Rev. William Wightman, the chair of the Wofford board of
trustees, and Jones was contracted to design Wofford’s Main Building.  We still have his drawings and instructions in
the archives. 

Also in the 1850s, Jones and his partner (and former
apprentice) Francis Lee designed the main building of Furman University’s
Greenville campus, courthouses and jails in other counties, the Episcopal
Church of the Holy Cross in Stateburg, Kensington Mansion in Eastover, lower
Richland County, and many other homes.  Also
in the 1850s, it appears that he designed some churches in western North
Carolina – probably those frequented by Charlestonians during their summer
holidays. 

His years in South Carolina were short, though quite
productive.  Active in Charleston from
about 1847 to the outbreak of the Civil War, Jones worked in York during the
war, and afterward, he landed in Memphis, just in time to take advantage of the
city’s postwar growth. 

For years, we at Wofford knew nothing of Jones’ post-Civil
War career.  Only as we began working on
the college sesquicentennial did research unearth Jones’s second career.  On a trip to Memphis in 2004, I sought out a
number of Jones’ buildings. 

There he
worked in a few newer styles, largely building churches and homes.  One of his churches, Beale Street Baptist, built shortly after the Civil War, was the first brick church built by blacks for blacks in the mid-South.  I believe the front is in the style often called “Romanesque Revival.”  Late in his life he worked on an early
skyscraper in Memphis – the Porter Building, which still stands.  One of his Memphis churches later became Clayborn Temple, the site of Dr. Martin Luther King’s last address.  

Photos, from top to bottom, Kensington Mansion, Richland County, SC; the Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross in Stateburg, Sumter County, SC; Beale Street Baptist Church, Memphis, TN; the Porter Building, Memphis, TN.  All photos taken by yours truly. 

When Henry Nelson Snyder became president of Wofford in 1902, he knew the college’s physical facilities were becoming inadequate.  During the first ten years of his administration, Snyder brought more new buildings to the campus than had been built since the original campus was built.  In addition to a residence hall and a new library, Snyder moved the science departments into a brand new science hall, the first new academic building on campus since Main Building.

The bills totaled some $25,000.  And John B. Cleveland, for whom the science hall was named, paid them all.  With some occasional modifications and renovations, the building continued to be the home of science at Wofford until the early 1960s.

Those renovations began very quickly.  The building was built with running water and electric lights, but space was soon at a premium.  Students dug out a room under the southeast corner of the first floor in 1910 to build an electrical laboratory.  During the 1930s, using National Youth Administration labor, students with shovels and picks dug out even more space in the basement.   Professor E. H. Shuler, who taught applied math and surveying, supervised the work, which added lab and storage space.  The Spartanburg County Foundation donated a planetarium, which was installed in the dome.

 

Wofford’s Campus Life Building was designed in the late
1970s to serve as the hub of campus athletic, social, and cultural activity,
according to an article in the local paper. 
At that time, basketball was in Andrews Field House and the Student
Affairs Office was in Burwell.  The
canteen?  In Wightman.  The Theatre Workshop?  Old Carlisle Hall.  But in the late 1970s, the college was
looking to bring together all of these different activities and offices into
one building. 

One of the main features of the new building was the arena,
designed with movable seating to accommodate 3,000 people.  Though designed primarily for basketball,
college officials expected the arena to see use for other athletic and cultural
activities.  Named for Benjamin Johnson, a
vice president and general counsel of Spartan Mills, a Wofford Trustee, and a
member of the class of 1930, the arena has been the site of various dances, dinners,
programs, and Commencement 2003 was held there when the weekend turned into a
total washout.  The first basketball game
in the arena, on January 22, 1981, was between the Lady Terriers and Sacred
Heart, and after the building’s dedication following the women’s game, the men’s
basketball team played The Citadel.  Beyond
the formal events, many a student will remember the days of arena registration
– when students ran from one table to another to beg professors to let them
into a closed class – which took place on the floor and concourses of the
arena. 

While the building, which opened in the 1980-81 academic
year, initially was supposed to have meeting rooms, classrooms, racquetball
courts, facilities for commuting students, many of these did not make it into
the final building.  Offices for student
affairs and athletics took up most of the top floor, the theatre, a movie-lecture
room, a television lounge, and a game room took up the main floor, and the
arena and lockers made up the lower level. 
The Tony White Theater, which was dedicated on February 20, 1981, was a black
box style theater that provided much-needed space for the college’s growing
theatre program.  The premiere production
in the new theater was Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, directed by Professor James
R. Gross. 

The Campus Life Center was the first new building completed
on the campus in over ten years, and it marked the first in a series of newer
buildings constructed during the Lesesne Administration.  When I came to Wofford in 1990, the campus
life building hadn’t changed much since its opening. The game room had become the college bookstore, the TV room and lounge had been combined and turned into Zach's, the college canteen.  Both of these facilities had moved from old Wightman Hall.  But the building was already overcrowded, with coaches and student affairs staff members elbowing for space on the top floor.  With the opening of the Richardson Building in 1995, more space opened up for student groups on the top floor.  

In the early 2000s, the lobby was renovated into The Commons, with a coffee/smoothie bar, and a very tired, early 1980s look gave way to a sleek, modern, yet comfortable design, with TVs, computer workstations, and more art.  Those of us who remember what the building looked like in the early 1990s hardly recognize the lobby as the same place – where it was merely a pass-through space on the way to the bookstore or to Zach's in those days, today it's truly a student-oriented gathering space.  

Photos – the building from Snyder Field, a dinner (probably a senior dinner) in the arena, the South Carolina Methodist Annual Conference in session in the arena.  

The first Wightman Hall was an experiment that Wofford chose not to repeat. 

In the mid-1950s, with several of the college's residence halls and the main dining facility approaching a half-century of use. Wofford officials began to plan a new facility for students that would combine dorm rooms and a new kitchen and dining room.  The building was on the site of the old Wilbur E. Burnett Gymnasium, and cost about $500,000.  The dorm was originally built for 120 students, with 20 rooms on each of the top three floors.  The rooms were in suites of four rooms, and each suite shared a bathroom.  In a fairly novel design, each dormitory room opened onto outside corridors – essentially, wrap-around balconies.  The dining room, and space for a canteen and bookstore, were on the main floor, and there was a new kitchen in the basement.  Construction begain in 1957 and was completed the next year.  These additional rooms would allow the college to retire some of the older facilities, not to increase the size of the student body. 

As Bishop Will Willimon noted in one of his essays, the person who designed Wightman Hall had no understanding of the perverted mind of the college male.  Wightman was the scene of Wofford's legendary food fight-riot – though reports of food fights and riots in the mid-1960s are legendary.  The open balconies gave students ample opportunity to hone their throwing ability, and if it could be thrown from a fifth floor balcony, someone probably tried it.  Water balloons, tissue paper, and even an occasional mattress would find their way to the ground. 

Wightman was also Wofford's first co-educational residence hall, as the first class of women to live on campus found themselves occupying the top floor of the residence hall. 

The dining room on Wightman's main floor proved to be a fairly short-lived experiment.  With the opening of the Burwell Campus Center next door, the main student dining room moved out of Wightman.  The vacant dining room became the college canteen and bookstore, a situation that lasted until the Campus Life Building opened in 1981.  Renovations to provide a new laundry room and just over a dozen more residence hall rooms began in late 1983 and continued through 1984, with occupancy in the fall of 1985.  Those rooms were considerably nicer than those on the three floors above, partly because they were newer and partly because the rooms opened onto an inside hallway.  And although the dining room had moved, the Wightman basement continued to be used as the college's main kitchen. 

Plans to expand the Milliken Science center caused the college to build a new residence hall on Evins Street in 1998-99, and Wightman Hall was abandoned and demolished in early 1999.  However, the kitchen remains – the residence hall literally had to be demolished around the kitchen.  If you look carefully, the kitchen is sort of hidden behind the Milliken Center.  And, in tribute both to Wofford's first president and to the college's tradition of naming dorms after presidents, the new facility on Evins Street was renamed Wightman Hall. 

Note: It has come to my attention that the 1983 renovation date for Wightman is not entirely correct, so I've modified it in the text above.  Always feel free to correct errors, especially if you remember events differently than I record them!

No one tried to name that building.  

The building was the W. E. Burnett Gymnasium, built after a call from President Carlisle to the alumni expressed the need for a first-class gymnasium on the campus.  After Andrews Fieldhouse was constructed in 1929, it saw many alternate uses – perhaps the campus's first adaptive reuse of a building.  It housed the ROTC department, served as a rifle range, a recreational hall (hopefully not at the same time), a canteen, a band room, a classroom, and finally, as the headquarters of the music and art department in the early 1950s.  

Here's a challenge from the archives to all of you out there.  Name this building.  

As you can see from the second picture, it doesn't exist on the campus any more, but it stood for many years.  

 

I don't have any prizes other than bragging rights for those of you who can tell me what it is, but if you want to make a guess, you can leave a comment.