College Hall Excavations and MSU’s Phases of Development
00:00
Alice Lynn McMichael (ALM): This is Alice Lynn McMichael with Autumn Painter. This interview is Chapter 3, Part 2, concluding the Campus Archaeology Program oral history interviews with Lynne Goldstein.
Autumn Painter (AP): Topics include College Hall and MSU’s phases of development. It was recorded on April 23rd, 2018.
ALM: Alright. Dr Goldstein, could you tell us a little bit about College Hall and the model?
Lynne Goldstein (LG): Okay. One of the things that people don’t appreciate, I think, about what we’ve done with campus archaeology is that Terry Brock and I, when we began doing this, we realized very early on that we needed a model. And not a complicated model, a simple model. But a model that allows us, no matter where we’re working or what we’re doing, it allows us to place whatever we find in some kind of comprehensive context. So the model we created is based on economic factors, it’s based on technology, transportation. It’s based on what’s going on in the world.
So there are four phases. Phase one is the beginnings, from the beginning of the college to about 1870, from 1855 to 1870. And that’s really the sort of, you know, the historians call that the starvation period. I mean, it was pretty bleak. Then the second — what second period is 1870 to 1900. And that period is really all about the moral act and, and development and growth of the college.
1900 to 1925 is really interesting. That’s the third phase. That’s the women’s program, automobiles appear on campus, so it’s not just on trolleys and that sort of stuff and horse and buggies and stuff. So it really changes the dynamic nature of the campus, what becomes the front and what becomes the back, because with cars that all changes. So, in other words, like Circle Drive is the prime example. Circle Drive was there to be the back. All the buildings, that was the backs of the buildings. The front was all onto the sacred space. So, so that’s, that was the idea behind it. So then with cars, then it flipped. The backs became the front and the front became the back. So, so again, so that’s that third period.
Then the fourth period is [19]25 to [19]55 and that reflects the war — World War One is kind of more in the, the first part. Everybody was – and the Civil War, everyone in the first period was in the Civil War. But, you know, so then the [19]25 to [19]55, that’s separated because of the war and the G.I. Bill and, and the growth, the dramatic growth of the university. And that’s, that sort of legacy, we call it a legacy period. So those four periods — it seems like really simple dumb stuff, but it’s critical, because it provides that intellectual model for what we see.
03:30
Okay, so a good example of how that works is College Hall. College Hall was the very first building on campus. It was the building that everything happened. I mean everything. They didn’t live there, but they, you know. Offices where there, classes where there, everything was there. Well, College Hall was built like everything else, low bid, and it kept having terrible problems, terrible, terrible problems. Why? Because it was built pretty crummy and when they cleared the land, the students cleared the land, but when the contractors came in to build the building, they didn’t remove the stumps. So they put the stones on top of where the stumps were and, of course, as the stumps decomposed, the walls cracked because the rocks move, you know, the, the basements moved. And so they were continuously having to fix College Hall, and when I say they, I mean the students, because the students did all, a lot of that work. They didn’t build buildings, but they fixed things.
And so, in 1918, which is in the, past this first period in the second period, into the third, in 1918, they were doing this big, you know, 4th of July sort of celebration, you know, with band playing and all of that stuff. And they were outside College Hall, which, of course, they always were for that sort of thing, and the band struck up to play and part of the building collapsed. Fortunately, nobody was in it and nobody got hurt, but it was sort of the last straw for College Hall.
Now, what happened then — now College Hall was there at the very beginning. It was there in the second period. It still was administration even though we had other buildings for classes and dorms and all of that by that point in the second period. When it collapsed, there was a question — I mean, it was the symbol of the university, or the college at that point, it was the symbol. So, it collapsed. What do you do? What do you put up?
Well, what happened was — and we’ll get back to this — but the rubble was taken away and with what was left of the basement and the base part of the building, they built an artillery garage, because it was World War One and they had people who were training and all of that stuff. Well, do you really want the central feature on your campus to be an artillery garage? I mean, it seems kind of bizarre. And it was ugly! You know, it had basement parts from this — you know.
06:17
So anyway, what happened was that students would come back to visit. And in the twenties, a student came back to visit and was horrified, not so much the College Hall was gone, but more that there was an artillery garage there. In other words, his feeling was the college has to change. It can’t remain the same. But this was a symbol of the beginnings and, and what, we didn’t have it anymore, and instead, we had this artillery thing. And so what he did is give money to build Beaumont Tower, Beaumont. So he gave money to build Beaumont Tower, which eventually — it took several years to build [19]25 to [19]28. And in [19]28, it opened.
Alright, so it is on the footprint of College Hall.
ALM: I didn’t know that.
LG: Yes. And, in fact, we found the corner of College Hall in the — under the sidewalk of one, just to the — what would that be? To the southeast of the building. And so, so that, you know, so that’s what, where College Hall was. We tried to find more of it, but when we went — when I went back and looked at the building, the pictures of building Beaumont Tower, they destroyed anything that would have been. I mean, they really did a lot of destruction. In part, because they were building this tower and they had to go deeper and stuff. They really screwed it up.
But, so, when we were doing some other work, one of the other problems that early campus had is that the football stadium is where it is now. That’s where it was originally built. But one of the problems was what every time the river flooded, you couldn’t get to the football stadium. And so that was an issue.
So what could they do? So what they did was they had to build a bridge, a new bridge. And they had, and — so in the very first documented instance of them actually altering the landscape, I mean, significantly, what they did is build up that area right in front of where Sparty is today — you know, the bridge goes over — and they built up that whole area. And so in that lower area off the bridge to the, to the north – well, is it north there? Yeah, well sort of northeast. They were putting in some new trees and so we went to see what, if there was anything there. And, in fact, we found all this rubble. I mean tons and tons of rubble and really old bricks. And we couldn’t figure out what it was, because there was nothing that was there.
They had never built anything there. So what was all this rubble? I mean, it was amazing amounts of it. Huge quantities. We don’t know what it was and then, all of a sudden, in the excavations, we found this piece of plaster and the piece of plaster had writing on it. And we had no idea what it was. So we went to archives – we’ll search and look for it. And in, in the archives — it was a picture back from the artillery days — it was a picture of the basement of College Hall and every time the students were down there they would sign their names. And so this was a thing that said May 1889, you know, worked on College Hall, darn hard job, and then everybody signed it. And what we had found was a piece with signature on it which matched exactly.
ALM: Oh, wow.
LG: So that allowed us to understand that that adaptation was from that — they had that the football players, we knew that, take the rubble away and now we knew where they put it. And they put it there to build up that land. And so there we were able to link these two different sites, because we could use the structure of the model we built to do that.
ALM: Interesting. And it speaks to kind of the changing landscape over time as well.
LG: Exactly. So that’s, that’s how we’ve used it over time. And, and so it’s a great example of it, because it stretches over several different periods.
ALM: Well, thank you. Do you have any other questions or anything else you’d like to tell us for this oral history.
LG: Nope. Not, not that I can think of.
ALM: Well, thank you very much.
AP: Thank you.
LG: You’re very welcome.