Tag Archives: Cottage Edifice

p. 152 – Recovery and expansion, 1850-1869

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But by the late ’50’s, the long-time student interest in maintaining buildings and grounds seems to have given way to an enthusiasm for gymnastic exercises. Through their own endeavors they built a gymnasium in 1858 and equipped it with a trapeze, ropes and rings, and other apparatus. The next year the Trustees hired a janitor to keep the classrooms clean, shovel paths in winter and do other jobs students had usually done.

The need for an auditorium larger than the chapel in West Hall led to the construction of the Hall of Alumni and Friends. In 1858 Henry C. Vogell, Class of 1827, a University Trustee and pastor at Rome, New York, began soliciting subscriptions for a $20,000 building fund. The laying of the cornerstone took place the next year at commencement, with the presidents of Brown and Hamilton as honored guests. Since the Trustees had been unable to agree on a site, three having been considered, the ceremony took place on the north side of East and West Halls. Immediately afterward, however, they chose a location west of these structures. The Cottage Edifice which stood on part of the site was razed and by the following August the new three-story building, 107 feet by 75 feet, was nearly ready for the roof. Observers viewed with great interest the aerial tramway, suggested by Washington A. Roebling who later designed the Brooklyn Bridge, which conveyed the stone for the walls from the University quarry on the Hill above to the workmen below; as the staging was raised the lower end of the tramway was elevated.

One cornerstone, whether the original or not is unknown, carries the proud inscription: “Quod conamur perficimus“ (“We complete what we attempt”). These were brave words, for only the chapel, which occupied the entire third floor, was finished by August 1861. Vogell’s accounts had not balanced and the Trustees were obliged to borrow additional funds. Nonetheless, dedication exercises were held the day before commencement. The choir and congregation sang two original hymns by Samuel F. Smith, the author of “America.” The following stanza from the second was eminently fitting for the occasion:

 

Here may no Science, falsely named,
Thy sacred Word deny –
May error here be shunned and shamed,
In knowledge from on high.

 

The night prior to the exercises prankster students built a huge

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p. 101 – Administrative problems and incorporation, 1833-1846

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To supplant the Cottage Edifice, which the increased enrollment made too small for dining purposes, a new Boarding Hall was built in 1838 under the supervision of Steward Edmunds. It was 95 feet long, 42 feet wide, and two stories high. Its site “on the plain” where the present Huntington Gymnasium now is, was considered to have several advantages: students would get exercise by walking down the Hill for their meals; produce could be brought in easily from the Society’s farm; and access to the village for business purposes would be convenient. The Cottage Edifice was fitted up for classrooms.

Students themselves provided what today would be called janitor service. They not only kept their own rooms in order but also rang the bell for classes and services, swept and lighted the classrooms, and heated them with wood which they themselves sawed and chopped. A sense of cleanliness and neatness does not seem to have restrained some from throwing various objects out of dormitory windows. The faculty and Students Association found it necessary to make regulations prohibiting the practice, the Association even voting a fine of one shilling for throwing out water, especially mop water.

The Board and students took measures for fire protection, but no significant conflagrations occurred. In 1837 the Trustees directed the steward to take out a $10,000 fire insurance policy. Occupants of dormitories were required to furnish themselves with sheet-iron covered pans for carrying live coals to their stoves and were directed not to steal embers from classrooms. Each was supposed to have a pail full of water in his room in the evening before retiring for use in case of emergencies. One December Sunday in 1837 there were two small fires in West Hall. The first started in a chimney during the night, and burned into the ceiling by morning when it was put out. The second happened in the afternoon when most of the students were attending services in the village. When the alarm was given, the congregations in the Baptist,· Congregational, and Episcopal churches immediately broke up and raced for the Hill in sleighs, on horseback and on foot. Before many arrived the blaze, again in a chimney, had been extin­guished. Within a few days the Board asked that two bucket brigades and a property-recovering company be formed, but apparently these organizations were short-lived because within a few years new ones were established.

By 1840 the Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution had

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p. 83 – Student life, 1833-1846

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entered left to go into the ministry without completing their courses or even advancing to the beginning of the theological instruction. The principal reason was lack of funds.

The Education Society, so far as its means permitted, assisted poor students after they had been enrolled long enough for the faculty to judge their “character and talents.” As beneficiaries, they received board and tuition in return for a pledge promising to refund the expenditures in their behalf. In 1840 the Trustees refused to accept students as beneficiaries unless they gave clear intention of completing their course.

The total annual expense in 1833 in any of the three departments was $58.00, of which $16.00 represented tuition and $42.00 board and washing at the rate of $1.25 per week. By 1846 expenses for a lay student in the collegiate department totaled $93.00. Of this sum, tuition represented $30.00; board and washing, at $1.25 per week, $50.00; room rent, $9.00; incidentals, $3; and sacred music instruction $1. A non-ministerial student in the academic department paid the same charges except tuition, which was $20.00. Ministerial students in the academic and collegiate departments were not charged for room rent, hence their expenses were $74.00 and $84.00 respectively. Stu­dents in the theological department paid only $54.00 since tuition and room rent were free.

The quality of food which the Steward, in his efforts to keep down expenses, was able to provide for $1.25 per week would not be rated very high by modern standards. One student wrote in 1841, that breakfast consisted of coffee, bread and butter; dinner of meat, potatoes, bread and butter; and supper of milk, bread and butter. Today such a diet would be considered totally inadequate, but a century ago when Americans made relatively little use of fresh fruits, milk and leafy vegetables it was not so unsatisfactory as it now seems.

In the late 1830’s, Steward James Edmunds had great difficulty in getting provisions. Flour cost more than $60.00 a barrel and ordinary quality wheat $1.87 a bushel. Over three barrels of flour, or fifteen bushels of wheat, were needed each week to supply his boarders. Since the Steward did not find sufficient breadstuffs in the immediate vicinity, he had go as far as Ohio to buy them. He also resorted to substituting potatoes for the expensive wheat flour.

The Cottage Edifice served as the commons until 1838 when the

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p. 35 – Administration, setting and staff, 1820-1833

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in a seminary situated in an area recently frontier and drawing many of its students from simple country homes. Born on a Vermont farm near Bennington in 1782, he began “keeping school” at the age of eighteen, meanwhile reading in preparation for entering Middlebury College to which he was admitted in 1803 as a sophomore. At this new and undeveloped institution, founded only three years previously, he earned all his expenses. He was a member of the Philomathesian Society, a secret literary group, and at his graduation in 1806 participated with five of his classmates in “A Dialogue on the Means of Advancing Human Felicity” and also delivered “An Oration on True Greatness.” His own privations and struggles for an education enabled him to appreciate the hardships of many of his students. He stood before them as an example of what they might achieve through dogged perseverance and hard work.

Slightly under six feet, compact and wiry in build, he had blue eyes, light hair, a fair complexion, and symmetrical features. He impressed his students with his energy, simplicity, and devotion to the Institution. They were drawn to him by his cordiality, lack of affectation, and humility. The stories of his directing men building the Cottage Edifice as he sat at the window of West Hall hearing the recitations of a class, or, once the hour was over, leading his students to the stone quarry or the hay field where he took the lead in the work at hand, help to make clear his hold over them. Hascall was not a great scholar-as were few college teachers of the period were-but he was an independent, logical thinker who could express himself in a fresh and direct style. One friend called him a man “of the Doric order:’ His theology, though strongly Calvinistic, differed from Kendrick’s in that he refused to accept the doctrine of Particular Atonement which Kendrick firmly believed. This difference of opinion failed to cloud their close and affectionate relationship.

Hascall and Kendrick were well paired for conducting the affairs of the Institution. Where one was modest, diffident, and almost distrustful of himself, the other was bold and self-possessed but at the same time neither forward nor presumptuous. Kendrick first began teaching in the fall of 1820 when he came over to Hamilton from Eaton three times a week to give lectures on philosophy and theology. Two years later the Executive Committee elected him Professor of Theology and

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p. 33 – Administration, setting and staff, 1820-1833

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Besides the chapel, West Hall contained a lecture room, a library, and studies and sleeping rooms which could accommodate about seventy students, two to the room. Occupants were permitted to paint the walls of their rooms if they wished and furniture from the “stone building on the plain,” which groups and individuals had provided, was transferred to chambers in the new building bearing the names the donors had specified for those in the old one. Since lack of furniture made it possible at first to use less than half of the sleeping rooms, appeals went out for contributions of beds, bedding and other equipment. Outfitting quarters for students cost $50.00.

Extensive renovations have obliterated all traces of the original interior but externally the building is the same as it was in 1827. One observer then wrote that the structure was plain, well designed and constructed, and showed marks of strict economy. Today architects still comment on its simplicity and excellent proportions. In the general exterior design it resembles other college buildings of the period including Painter Hall at Middlebury, Hascall’s Alma Mater.*

Within a week after West Hall was dedicated, Hascall had completed, at a cost of $950, a “large convenient” boarding house, known as the “Cottage Edifice,” and a wood house; both were, of course, necessary complements to the new classroom and dormitory building. The boarding house, which stood between West and the present Alumni Halls, was 48 feet long and 34 feet wide and two stories high. The cellar and kitchen were in the first story, the dining room and living quarters for the steward and his family in the second.

The campus of the 1820’s and 30’s probably was bleak, bare of trees or shrubs, and without landscaping to enhance the natural beauty of the site. A new road down to the present College Street was opened and about ten acres to the north stretching to that highway were purchased. Hascall, acting as superintendent of buildings and grounds, cleared the space around the buildings and enclosed it with a fence. He also removed to the rear of the boarding house an old distillery, presumably once operated by Samuel Payne, for the students to use as a workshop. By 1829 Kendrick could report that the Education Society owned real estate worth over $12,000.

Hascall, Kendrick, and other faculty members to a lesser degree,

* The Trustees of the Hamilton Academy purchased the “building on the plain” for their boys’ department which occupied it until the academy was discontinued in the 1850’s. Hamilton Academy Record Book, Apr. 28, 1827.

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