The New DePauw University: Evolution of the Campus
In a mood of high optimism inspired by both the actual and the prospective financial contributions of New Albany industrialist Washington C. DePauw, the new DePauw University opened the academic year 1884-1885 with elaborate and ambitious–not to say grandiose–plans for an expanding educational program, described in detail in a 308-page catalogue with a portrait of the benefactor himself on the front cover. Indiana Asbury had been a university in name only, despite brief experiments with attached law and medical schools. DePauw sought to become a genuine university offering a variety of undergraduate and even graduate and professional degrees in several fields. In addition to the Asbury College of Liberal Arts, as the central body of the university was now dubbed, with its four divisions, the Classical Course, Philosophical Course, Scientific Course, and Course in Literature and Art, the new scheme of organization included separate branches for the three learned professions–theology, law, and medicine–along with special schools of music, art, pedagogy, horticulture, and “mechanical industries.” Listed among the latter was the School of Military Science and Tactics, which offered no degree but simply carried on under the supervision of a Regular Army officer the military training required of all underclassmen since 1876. Rounding out the organizational structure was the Greencastle Preparatory School, continuing the work of the preparatory department which dated back to the founding of the university.
While many of these innovations proved short-lived, the reinvigorated university prospered and grew over the years despite such temporary setbacks as the sudden death of Washington C. DePauw in May, 1887, and subsequent lengthy litigation over his will, plus financial losses in the Panic of 1893 which reduced the anticipated receipts from the estate. The Schools of Theology and Law, which took over and expanded the functions of Indiana Asbury departments of the same or similar name, endured for fourteen and ten years, respectively, although the Medical School, which was supposed to be located in Indianapolis, never materialized. Instruction in horticulture was offered for only a single year and in mechanical industries not at all. The Normal School attracted large numbers of students but was sacrificed in 1890 as a threat to the university’s high college standards. The Art School, though small, survived until 1913. Most successful of all the new branches was the School of Music, which has flourished up to the present. Although no network of similar “feeder” schools came into existence as originally envisioned, the Academy, as the Preparatory School was later called, continued to provide a significant proportion of the DePauw student body for several decades, closing only in 1916 after the rise of public high schools had usurped its function.
To accommodate this expansive vision of the new DePauw University the Board of Trustees led by its chairman and benefactor-founder W.C. DePauw also drew up ambitious plans for more spacious grounds and new physical plant. Citizens of Greencastle and Putnam County had met one of DePauw’s original conditions for his benefactions by raising funds to purchase large pieces of property adjacent to the old Indiana Asbury campus and by arranging for the acquisition of the 120-acre Jacob Durham farm on the northeastern edge of the city with money provided by DePauw himself, presumably a s a potential site for an ideal new campus of the future. These enlarged grounds were often described as being composed of five “parks”: West Park, the site of the college’s oldest building, rebuilt after the 1879 fire and renamed West College, and set amid a grove of trees; Center Park, where the almost new East College was located in the middle of a large, newly-landscaped area between College Avenue and Locust; East Park, a somewhat smaller plot bounded on the north and south by Anderson and Hanna Streets and containing only the Locust Street Methodist Church and the university-owned home of former president Matthew Simpson; South Park, several acres stretching south of Hanna Street given over chiefly to private use but particularly know for the attractive home and surrounding garden built by Professor William H. Larrabee in the 1840's called “Rosabower”; University Park, the huge tract of rolling farmland almost a mile from the main campus with only the Durham mansion standing near its western end.
As early as January, 1884, W.C. DePauw headed a committee of the Trustees that presented plans for an annex to West College and five new campus structures–an astronomical observatory, classroom buildings for law and theology, and two dormitories, one for men and one for women. The last were striking innovations for an institution which had never before assumed any responsibility for housing students and apparently owed their origin to DePauw himself, who had been impressed by the residential colleges of Great Britain he had recently visited. Besides the West College Annex the first construction to be completed was that of Ladies’ Hall, a three-story brick building of a plain, utilitarian design with rooms for eighty women, a large reception hall, and dining facilities for 250 students of both sexes. Located next to the Locust Street Methodist Church on the site of the later Mason Hall, this oldest DePauw dormitory remained an important campus social center until its destruction by fire in October, 1933. Gentlemen’s Hall, a four-story structure of otherwise identical style, was erected across campus on College Avenue, where it shared West Park with the remodeled West College. The two dormitories were also the first DePauw buildings to be heated by steam, as revealed by the absence of roof chimneys and the single smoke stack rising from a small outbuilding in the rear of each structure.
For some reason the buildings planned for the Schools of Theology and Law were replaced by a single new structure erected on the corner of Hanna and Locust Streets next to Ladies’ Hall and designated for use by the Schools of Music and Art. This building, rather more handsome than the two dormitories with its steep mansard roof, became the longtime home of the Music School after art classes were moved to nearby Simpson House a few years later. Meanwhile law and theology classes were conducted in rooms in the College Avenue and Locust Street churches, both located conveniently close to the DePauw campus. Finally, the gift of Robert McKim of Madison, Indiana, made possible the erection of an observatory on a knoll in the eastern part of University Park. McKim Observatory, a small tow-story stone building furnished with a revolving iron dome, an equatorial telescope, and other astronomical equipment, remained the solitary occupant for many years of this remote section of the university’s greatly expanded campus.
Between 1885 and the end of the century only one new building was added. This was Florence Hall, the gift of DePauw’s widow and daughter Florence, erected in 1891 in South Park facing College Avenue. A rather ungraceful-appearing, three-story brick structure, it provided rooms and dining facilities fo men, especially theology students, who were offered virtually free lodging. Gentlemen’s Hall, no longer needed for dormitory purposes, was converted in 1892 into a classroom building and renamed Middle College. With the erection of Ladies Hall in 1885, the university authorities had begun to require that all women students reside in rooms there unless specifically exempted. No such requirement existed for men, who apparently preferred to live in rooming houses and in some cases in the fraternity chapter houses which were appearing in the nineties. Florence Hall, therefore, was refitted in 1904 for women residents instead of men, though dining facilities were coeducational.
At the turn of the century the main DePauw campus contained six red-brick buildings clustered near the center of a twenty-five acre expanse of tree-covered lawns, bordered by the two steepled Methodist Churches and a number of private dwellings. The city streets running the campus were still unpaved, though sidewalks, mostly of brick, had been constructed alongside them for pedestrian traffic. Near East College stood the Boulder, an oddly rigid granite rock discovered in a field near Morton by a farmer who exhibited it on his farm as a petrified turtle before a few alumni purchased it and removed it to campus in June, 1892. Ten years later the Scarritt Fountain, surmounted by a bronze owl, was erected nearby, the gift of an alumnus of the class of 1882. Both soon became centers of various campus activities and traditions. It was not long before alumni groups began to make anniversary gifts to beautify the central campus, particularly by constructing concrete sidewalks around East College. Most noteworthy of all such gifts was the ornamental iron and brick gateway providing an entry to campus at the juncture of Locust and Anderson Streets, erected by the class of 1890 in celebration of its twentieth anniversary in 1910. A major improvement to the physical plant was the introduction of electric lighting to replace the former oil and gas lamps. Finally, in 1906 a new boiler installed in the furnace room behind Middle College made possible the extension of a central steam heating system to many campus buildings by a network of underground pipes. About this time, the university catalogue ceased to describe the campus as divided into five parks. Instead it spoke of West Campus, Center or Middle Campus, East Campus, and South Campus, plus University Park, the area around McKim Observatory, which was reduced to seventeen acres when the university gave up the dream of expanding there and sold the remaining acreage, and McKeen Athletic Park, a large field west of campus acquired in 1897 and named after a donor, Terre Haute railroad man W.R. McKeen.
Financial reverses in the nineties slowed the progress of plans for the long-sought expansion of laboratory, library, and gymnasium facilities. In 1901, however, Chancellor William R. Hickman, who had inaugurated a major fund-raising campaign two years before, was able to announce that a Terre Haute manufacturer, D.W. Minshall, had agreed to underwrite the construction of a building devoted to the physical sciences. The next year Minshall Laboratory, a three-story, U-shaped, red brick and limestone structure located in Center Campus facing College Avenue, was ready for occupancy of its northern wing by the chemistry department. Not long afterwards the physics department moved into the southern wing, sometimes sharing its facilities with the mathematics department. This building, the last of the rather plain, functional style which characterized most of the campus construction since 1884, served the physical sciences well for seventy years.
New library facilities had to wait until 1908, when after a long series of negotiations with agents of Andrew Carnegie, who first turned down DePauw’s request, the Carnegie Library was erected next to the College Avenue Methodist Church with funds contributed by the great steelmaker-benefactor as well as by alumni others. Breaking with the utilitarian re-brick tradition, the well-established Indianapolis architectural firm of D.A. Bohlen and Sons designed it in a neo-classic style. Constructed completely of Bedford limestone, with two pairs of columns of the Ionic order adorning both the front entrance and the south side, the library was often described as the “most beautiful building on campus”. Despite its handsome appearance, it proved barely adequate for its purposes during the nearly half a century it was to serve as the university’s chief book depository.
It was soon apparent that a new era of campus construction was at hand. Having forsaken the dream of moving to Observatory Park, the DePauw administration and trustees sought to build a permanent, modern physical plant on the main campus. Contributions flowed in from wealthy benefactors making possible the erection of a number of architect-designed college buildings planned to be esthetically pleasing as well as functional. In 1916 the Bowman Memorial Building was erected, providing at long last more spacious indoor athletic facilities for both men and women. Named for Thomas Bowman, former Indiana Asbury president and Methodist bishop whose daughter was a major donor, this imposing brick and limestone structure located just south of Hanna Street contained a large gymnasium, swimming pool, and dressing rooms, and also served as a university auditorium when needed and a meeting place for various student activities. In that same year Edward Rector, a Chicago attorney and recently elected member of the board of trustees, made the first of a series of generous gifts which ultimately benefitted both the building program and student scholarships. The immediate result was the building in 1917 of Rector Hall, a commodious new women’s dormitory and dining hall named for the donor’s father, Isaac Rector, a onetime trustee of Indiana Asbury, and designed in classical revival style by Indianapolis architect Robert Frost Daggett, whose father’s firm, R.P. Daggett and Company, had drawn the plans for Bowman Gymnasium. In 1918 another Daggett-designed structure, the handsome Studebaker Memorial Administration Building, was erected on Locust Street, the gift of the family of Clement Studebaker, Sr., the pioneer South Bend buggy and automobile manufacturer.
The rapid growth of student enrollment after WWI, especially in respect to women, whose numbers almost reached parity with men, made necessary further expansion of dormitory facilities. In 1918 Women’s Hall, whose residents could now take their meals in nearby Rector Hall, had been extensively remodeled and renamed Mansfield Hall in honor of Belle A. Mansfield, longtime dormitory preceptress as well as college instructor and dean of both the Art and the Music Schools. At the same time Florence Hall, which had housed women since 1904, was returned to its original use a s a male dormitory, especially for non-organization men. Many members of fraternities and sororities were living in their chapter houses, some of the rented or purchased homes and others newly constructed building near the campus, but the university authorities had already begun to insist that all freshmen women reside in hall and to “encourage” freshmen men to do so. To implement the latter provision, a sleeping porch was added to Florence Hall and in 1921 a huge wooden annex was built next door to provide additional rooms. Rosabower, which had been used for several years to house women, became the college infirmary, but it was not long before the university had to acquire other buildings to serve as women’s annexes on the east and north sides of campus.
Edward Rector, who had already inaugurated the Rector Scholarship Foundation which financed the education of hundreds of male students after 1919, furnished the funds for the construction of two additional dormitories, one for men and one for women, though he did not live to see them built. In 1927 the new men’s hall was completed, located south of Florence on College Avenue. Named for Henry B. Longden, professor of German and secretary of the Rector Scholarship Foundation, it provided both housing and dining facilities for men equal to those for women for the first time. It was followed in 1928 by the construction of Lucy Rowland Hall–given Mrs. Rector’s maiden name–on the site of Music Hall, which was moved diagonally across the street in order that the three women’s dormitory might form a partial quadrangle. Longden and Lucy Rowland Halls also helped the DePauw campus to achieve some degree of architectural unity by repeating the classical revival design employed by their architect, Robert F. Daggett, in his earlier work on Rector Hall and Studebaker.
The DePauw physical plant underwent other significant changes in this period as well. Music Hall, moved to its new site next to Bowman Gymnasium in 1927, was enlarged and a frame annex constructed behind it to accommodate additional studies and practice rooms. These buildings provided adequate, but not luxurious, quarters for the School of Music for the next fifty years. In the same year a private dwelling located just south of Studebaker was purchased and adopted for use as a Home Management House by the home economics department, which also operated a university-owned cafeterias nearby. Meanwhile the university acquired the two Methodist churches on College Avenue and Locust Street when their congregations agreed to merge. The Locust Avenue edifice, after brief occupation by the department of public speaking, was refitted as an armory, for which purpose it was used until the disbanding of the military program in 1934, when it was torn down. The College Avenue church, on the other hand, was completely remodeled in 1929 and survived as a campus landmark for nearly five decades as Speech Hall, the home of the Little Theater and the speech and education departments. The new and larger church structure built by the combined congregations in a late Gothic revival mode in 1929 was rededicated two years later as the Gobin Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church in honor or Hilary Asbury Gobin, a former dean of the School of Theology and president of the university. Located adjacent to the campus and often serving as a meeting place for university functions, Gobin Church came to regarded as virtually an integral part of DePauw.
Finally, it became obvious that a replacement had to be found for West College, the oldest building on campus. In recent years it had housed classrooms, an armory-gymnasium, and the Little Theater but by 1929 had been declared unsafe for any use except as a warehouse. Funded by contributions by Josiah K. Lilly and others, a large reinforced concrete and brick structure was erected in 1930 near the deteriorating “Old Asbury” and christened Asbury Hall in recognition of Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury, for whom the university had originally been named. This spacious, handsomely designed building, which accommodated faculty studies and classrooms for the humanities and social science departments and thus became one of the most frequented campus locations, inaugurated an important new style of architecture at DePauw when Robert F. Daggett chose to shift from the classical revival mode he had employed in his earlier designs for the Studebaker Building and Rector, Lucy, and Longden Halls to the colonial revival form sometimes known as Williamsburg or American Georgian, or simply “collegiate colonial”. This style, so popular on many American college campuses in the 1930's and thereafter, was to become a chief component in the developing eclectic pattern of DePauw architecture.
The financial crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression reduced university revenues, causing belt-tightening measures affecting faculty salaries and other instructional expenses, but did not bring continued improvement of the physical plant to a complete halt. In 1930 President G. Bromley Oxnam appointed to the newly-created position of Superintendent of Engineering, Construction and Maintenance Ralph E. Schenck, who as the representative of the Lewis Colvin Construction Company of Indianapolis had supervised the building of Longden, Lucy Rowland, and Asbury Halls, as well as Gobin Memorial Church. Schenck, who also assumed the post of comptroller in 1935, presumably saved the university considerable sums of money by planning and executing with his own staff a number of campus construction projects without employing outside architects and general contractors. In 1931 Minshall Laboratory was modernized and an auditorium added on the first floor. The heating plant, which dated back to 1884, was enlarged, enabling it to supply steam to most campus buildings, including Gobin Church, and a handsome maintenance building was erected nearby. Student athletic fees largely paid for the construction of a small Field House on Blackstock Field in 1933, while revenues from the student newspaper and the yearbook, the Mirage, underwrote the Publication Building which was put up beside Asbury Hall in a matching design two years later. Also adding to the growing collegiate-colonial pattern of campus architecture was Locust Manor, a graceful two-story structure purchased from the Alpha Omicron Pi sorority in 1935 for use as a dormitory annex.
The outstanding accomplishment of the Schenk regime, however, was the design and construction of two extraordinarily handsome buildings, both of which were completed in 1940. A bequest from Augustus L. Mason, and Indiana Asbury alumnus who had served his alma mater as both trustee and Law School dean, provided most of the funding for Mason Hall, a four-story women’s dormitory and dining hall replacing Mansfield Hall, which had been destroyed by fire in 1933. Designed in the colonial revival style generally adopted by the university in this period, it featured an elegant semi-circular columned portico at its entrance on Anderson Street and opened out at the back on a terrace facing the women’s residential quadrangle–much later to become coeducational. Despite its deviation from the architectural design of Rectory and Lucy Rowland Halls, Mason brought to the dormitory complex on Locust Street a beauty and grace lacking in the austere structure it replace. Final settlement of the estate of John H. Harrison, an alumnus, trustee, and wealthy Illinois newspaper publisher who died in 1930, made possible the construction of Harrison Hall on the site of Middle College, recently condemned as a fire hazard, to provide much-needed classroom and laboratory space for the departments of botany, zoology,
geology, and psychology. Its three-story, red-brick exterior was carefully designed to match as closely as possible the colonial Williamsburg features of ten-year-old Asbury Hall standing directly opposite it, the two buildings together forming the nucleus of a potential academic quadrangle on the old Indiana Asbury campus. Among the unrealized ambitions of the administration of President Clyde E. Wildman was the future construction of a magnificent new library in the same collegiate-colonial style as the rest of the quadrangle.
The next decade, interrupted by the emergency conditions of the Second World War and immediate post-war years, saw little permanent change in the physical appearance of the college campus. O’Hair House on Seminary Street, gift of the heirs of Robert L. and Eva H. O’Hair, became the University Health Center in 1940, with a full-time physician and nursing staff installed the next year. Mrs. Ira B. Blackstock contributed the cost of constructing at Blackstock Field a 4000-capacity stadium with team dressing rooms below and a modern glass-enclosed press-box on top, which was ready for use in the fall of 1941. The botany department gained a greenhouse, erected beside Harrison Hall in 1942. The tidal wave of returning veterans after the war, many fo them married, some with young children, made imperative the securing of temporary housing on or near campus. In 1946 Quonset huts were erected just north of Florence Hall providing two small apartments each. At about the same time the university obtained eleven Army barrack, which were placed on three sites, on Locust Street and College Avenue, and in an area northeast of the observatory, and fifteen prefabricated cottages formerly used by employees of a powder plant in Wilmington, Illinois, relocated just south of the observatory. Despite their insubstantial character, most of these buildings long survived the postwar veteran influx, the barracks on College Avenue becoming in 1950 the Food Laboratory and later quarters for both the Air Force R.O.T.C. and the International Study Program, while the other structures provided housing, often barely adequate, for young faculty families as well as a few married students for many ears. After enduring “temporary” quarters in the old Florence annex and one of the postwar Quonset huts, the art department took over the old C.H. Barnaby Home on East Washington Street in 1949 and made it into the University Art Center. In 1949 a Quonset-type building was erected near Blackstock Field as a storeroom for the maintenance department.
The last major construction project of the Wildman administration was the Memorial Student Union Building, completed in 1952. A long-desired addition to the campus, this building came into existence as the result of a campaign by students and alumni–beginning as early as Old Gold Day of 1945–for an all-campus center for social activities. Designed by the Indianapolis architectural firm McGuire and Shook in the prevailing Colonial style, it was built in an L-shape form on the corner of Locust and Hanna Streets, its imposting whit columned portico facing the women’s quadrangle, and dedicated to the memory of the one hundred and six DePauw men who had lost their lives in the Second World War. Containing a ballroom-auditorium, a cafeteria and dining room, a bowling alley and billiard room, lounges and meeting rooms, and the studios for the DePauw radio station WGRE, the Union played an important role in integrating the social life of the campus. In 1954 an addition was built for a bookstore operated by Sam Hanna, whose downtown book shop was bought out by the university.
President Russell J. Humbert, who assumed office in 1951 as the Union Building was under construction, initiated a fund raising campaign known as the Greater DePauw Program, designed in part for new buildings. The first phase of this program included construction of a bigger and better facility to replace the Carnegie Library, the inadequacy of which had become more and more apparent as its holdings increased and the student body expanded. The librarian, Vera S. Cooper, worked with a joint faculty-student-trustee committee and two experts in library design, Joseph L. Wheeler and J. Russell Bailey, to plan a building meeting the university’s needs for both the present and the years ahead. Bailey, a Virginia architect, designed the new library in a style that departed radically from the Colonial mode employed in other recently erected campus structures in the direction of what might be called Functional Modern, giving greater attention to internal arrangement than external appearance. Named the Roy O. West Library in recognition of an alumnus and longtime trustee and friend of the university, its flat-roofed, box-like structure was faced with red brick, and matching brick walls and brick-edged walks were added in an attempt, at least partially successful, to bring it into architectural harmony with its neighbors in the academic quadrangle, Asbury and Harrison Halls. Two years later the old library building was remodeled into an Art Center with contributions from Benjamin and Fannie Blumberg of Terre Haute and others. At the same time the two-story, wooden frame building across the street from the new Art Center was purchased by the university and converted into air-conditioned studies for twenty-five members of the faculty.
The second phase of the Greater DePauw Program focused on the need for a larger, up-to-date men’s dormitory to replace the aging Florence Hall or “Flossie,” as generations of students who had resided there affectionately dubbed it. In 1961 Bishop Roberts Hall, named for Robert R. Roberts, pioneer Methodist bishop ion Indiana and a founder of Indian Asbury University, was opened, occupying a site immediately north of soon-to-be-razed Florence. Designed by the same architectural firm that had planned the Memorial Student Union Building, this three-story residential and dining hall was constructed on an L-shaped floor plan and with a red-brick exterior more or less conforming to the Williamsburg pattern of the Union. In many ways the construction of Bishop Roberts along with the razing of Florence marked the end of an era in the evolution of the Physical plant. Since the first decades of the twentieth century university administrators, boards of trustees, architects, and generous donors had combined to create a new and expanded vision of the college campus. Now East College was the sole survivor of the days of Old Asbury, while on Music Hall and McKim Observatory remained of the ambitious building schemes promulgated in the first years after the university’s change of name in 1884. The newer buildings were not only more substantial and better equipped, but they also added a new sense of grace and beauty. Bishop Roberts Hall, however, represented the final attempt on the part of university planners to maintain a kind of architectural pattern on campus, or indeed to follow any historical mode, whether Classical or Colonial. The future was to lie with the Modern.
The sudden death of President Hubert in June, 1962, brought a brief hiatus in university leadership. After a year during which Glenn W. Thompson, president of the board of trustees and visitors, acted as chief executive of the university, William E. Kerstetter assumed the DePauw presidency in the spring of 1963. In the meantime minor construction projects were completed, including additions to the Administration Building and the Bookstore as well as the erection on the site of the former Barnaby House and Art Center on South Washington Street of the Burkshire Apartments. These two buildings, the gift of alumni John and Ardath Y. Burkhart of Indianapolis, provided nine air-conditioned two-bedroom apartments for new members of the faculty, a decided improvement upon the barracks and prefabricated cottages previously serving that purpose. The Kerstetter administration soon followed its predecessor in launching a fund-raising campaign, called Design for a Decade, much of it earmarked for new construction. The first project to be completed was Hogate Hall, and air-conditioned women’s dormitory on South Locust Street named in honor of alumnus Kenneth C. Hogate, long-time editor of the Wall Street Journal and president of the Dow Jones Company. Opened in 1968 for occupancy by independent women–later becoming the first coeducational dormitory on campus–this attractive building was designed by the Chicago architectural firm of Holabird and Root in a quite untraditional style, its brick, stone and glass walls arranged in an accordion-like configuration and containing twenty-four six-person suites in place of the usual single and double rooms, in addition to a large lounge and dining room on the first floor.
In 1970 a modernistic, glass-and-steel structure was erected behind Gobin Memorial Church for a University Christian Center to house offices, seminar rooms, and a lounge for the activities of the chaplaincy program. A much larger project was the construction of a Science and Mathematics Center to provide facilities for the departments of physics and chemistry, which had long outgrown their Minshall Laboratory quarters, as well as the departments of mathematics and computer science and the earth sciences. A large portion of the first floor was allocated for the burgeoning computer apparatus and a science library. The bureau of testing and research and office of the School of Nursing also found quarters in the center. This huge concrete and brick, air-conditioned building was designed by the same architectural firm that planned Hogate Hall but in a strikingly different kind of modern style, featuring a cantilevered second story and a large open-air area on the roof of the auditorium. Completed in 1972, it was rededicated eight years later as the Percy L. Julian Mathematics and Science Center in recognition of the world-famous scientist who had begun his chemical researches as a student and later an instructor in DePauw’s Minshall Laboratory.
The last major building project of the Kerstetter administration was the construction of the Holabird and Rood-designed Performing Arts Center, a spacious, multi-level complex containing a 1500 seat auditorium, a 400-seat theater, a 22-seat recital hall, and several classrooms, as well as eighty-for practice rooms and studies for the members of the faculty of the School of Music and the department of communication arts and sciences. Completed in 1976, this magnificent structure located just south of the old Music Hall and its Annex was tooped by a 37-bell carillon tower whose musical sounds floated over the campus in competition with the bell in the East College tower. Meanwhile the university had begun to take up the question o the restoration of the remaining older buildings. In 1975 McKim Observatory, which had its telescope restored to is original condition in 1970 received an electric motor-driven aluminum dome to replace the old hand-operated, iron dome of 1884. The main question mark was East College, a memory-laden by physically weakening structure which would soon have to be either replaced or restored. A study made to determine the feasibility of restoration and the entering of East College on the National Register of Historic Places in September, 1975, turned the tide in favor of preservation.
Little was done during the two-year presidential interlude that followed the elevation of William E. Kerstetter to the chancellorship in 1975, but the inauguration of President Richard F. Rosser in 1977 opened the way for a successful campaign to raise the more than tow million dollars required to restore the much-loved building. Under the direction of architects H. Roll McLaughlin and Forrest Camplin of the Indianapolis firm of James an Associates, the majestic old building was refurbished inside and out and carefully restored to its original appearance–with the addition of such modern appurtenances as air-conditioning and florescent lighting. The three major gifts making this possible, memorialized in appropriate plaques, came from alumni Philip St. John Charles, Emilie Charles, and Caroline Hughes Crummey, the last daughter of former President Edwin H. Hughes. The dedication of the more-than-a-century-old
restored edifice in 1981 was a celebration of the spirit of Old Asbury in the midst of an extensive modernizing program for the whole DePauw campus.
At the same time the Rosser administration, embarking on an ambitious money-raising campaign, turned its attention to the replacement of the antiquated facilities for the indoor athletic program provided by Bowman Gymnasium. As a result the magnificent Lilly Physical Education and Recreational Center was opened in 1982 on newly-acquired land south of the Science Center. It was named collectively for Josiah K. Lilly, Jr., Josiah K. Lilly, Sr., and Colonel Eli Lilly of the pharmaceutical firm founded by the latter in Indianapolis, the father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, respectively, of the chief benefactor, Ruth Lilly Van Riper.
This imposing structure, designed by architect Herbert R. Thompson of the James Associates in the Modern style now generally adopted at DePauw with a re-brick exterior that matched rather closely the Performing Arts Center facing it across College Ave. Contained a spacious field, natatorium, auxiliary gymnasium, and numerous rooms for special sports and athletic exercises, in addition to classrooms and offices for the faculty and staff of the physical education depart. The field house itself was named for Raymond “Gaumey” Neal, popular coach and athletic directory, the surviving members of whose championship foot ball team of 1933 subscribed heavily toward its construction.
The completion of the Lilly Center together with the Perform ing Arts Center and the Julian Science and Mathematics Center finally brought to a close the long process of updating the DePauw physical plant that began after the Second World War. No further need for new campus facilities was envisioned, at least for the immediate future. The razing of Music Hall and Bowman Gymnasium, however, provided space and an opportunity for a unique campus beautification project that was carried out in 1983. On this centrally-located site between the Performing Arts Center and Hanna Street, there was created an open-air recreational plaza memorializing the Methodist bishop and Indiana Asbury president whose name had been give natural amphitheater, n to the former gymnasium, Bowman Plaza, with its outdoor café tables, fountain and reflecting pool, quickly became a popular campus meeting place. Altogether, the emphasis on beautification of the landscape began in the Kerstetter years was renewed and re-invigorated recently in an ongoing endeavor to heighten the harmonious union of well-designed buildings with orderly spaces covered by green lawns and a wide variety of carefully tended trees, shrubs, and small flowering plants.
Clifton J. Phillips, Professor Emeritus of History, 1987