Student Life at Sayer Hall 1908

Sayre Hall of Mercer College (now University of North Dakota) was built in 1908, the first in a series of four buildings. We have an extraordinary document, a biography of a 1908 student who gives explicit details of student life in the Hall during its first year of occupation. (See previous post for details)

Roy Thompson of Cando, ND, enrolled at the Grand Forks Preparatory School for his high school senior year in preparation for enrollment at the University of North Dakota. He was the first group of students to be housed at Sayre Hall that had just been completed. I have pulled out some of the most interesting observations about the building.

• The dormitory was managed by an amicable Mrs. Hoy, who lived with her daughter Grace in an apartment at the first floor of the building. 
• Upon arrival to the still unfinished building, Thompson and his room-mate selected their room. They chose the southwest corner on the third floor. It had two rooms, a study, and a bedroom.
• The dormitory was so new that they had to spend two hours unpacking and putting together the brand new beds, the dresser and chairs that had arrived in shipping craters.
• Electricity had not yet been installed, so they used candles at night.
• Mrs. Hoy warned to be careful, as the walls were not yet finished and asked them to step carefully over the floors that
  had not yet been finished.
• The overall impression of a building was austerity. The young Thompson who had grown up in a Victorian house with wooden floors and carpets was struck by the austerity of the Beaux Arts artifice that he likened to a prison: "The thick walls, the deeply set in windows and doors somehow gave the impression of being in a penitentiary."
• One of the most memorable visceral impressions was the sound of the hard floors: "We were much annoyed at first by the noise of the place. People waking on the terrazzo floors—that was before the day of rubber heels—could be heard distinctly on the two floors below us, and our floor like approaching horses on cement. The emptiness of the building contributed to this clatter, as well as the lack of curtains, carpets and wall decorations."
• As the semester progressed, Thompson describes the development of a residential comradery. "Meanwhile, everybody in the new dormitory gradually became accustomed to living in close contact with others, and almost before we realized it, life had become a series of routines, repeated five days a week. As in most dormitories there was a strong tendency on the part of the students to regard all property as public. An example was Wiley’s electric flat iron, the only one on our floor. It was used by all and sundry not only for pressing trousers, but also to “cook cocoa,” and make fudge. Many a “feed” was held in the wee small hours after lights had been turned off, when the prevailing dress was not evening but night. During the first year in Sayre all such feeds were negotiated by candle light, and happily so." Another important event was the arrival of food baskets from home. "One of the great moments in the life of a Sayre Hall resident was the arrival from home of a basket of food; everyone on the floor dropped whatever he as doing, and went to the room of the recipient, and had a 'feed'."
The students ate at the University's Dining Hall, but Mrs. Hoy began to host small groups of students for Saturdays dinners. "It was during this pioneer year that Mrs. Hoy conceived the idea of treating the residents of Sayre, two or three at a time, to a tasty repast in the clubroom. Such 'feeds' were, of necessity, given on the installment plan and spread out very a long series of Saturday evenings. These 'feeds' were long remembered by the Hall’s residents, all of whom were far from home, and were remembered as a distinct achievement in the matron’s initial year."
• There is one description of how the common room took over spiritual functions on Sundays. "Early in the year a Sunday evening Vesper Service was started by the management. At first the boys gathered around the piano informally and sang hymns; later there would be a speaker from Wesley College. Such meetings served as a substitute for church series, for those who were in the habit of going to church found in inconvenient to go to Grand Forks. But after a few months the attendance dropped off and the Sunday meetings abandoned."
• There is one interesting note about Sayre Hall's artistic life. Although not frequented very much, the basement floor had a piano. It was here that one student with an intense passion for classical music practiced for hours.

These are a few highlights that can be intersected with our survey of the building. For me, one of the most interesting parts of the biography is the description of the intellectual conversations that took place within Sayre Hall. Living next door to Thompson was the student Garth Howland, with whom he became life-long friends. Howland was studying art and introduced Thompson to German Expressionism. Together they attended an exhibition of prints by Die Brucke, which shocked the viewers. It is amazing to think that Grand Forks was so connected to artistic fashions that one could see a Die Brucke exhibition. Garth Howland had a stellar career. He studied painting (at Harvard, in Paris, etc.) and in 1926 he founded Lehigh University's Art Department. While at Bethlehem, he became an expert on 18th-century Moravian architecture. William Murtagh, the world expert on Moravian architecture writes in his Moravian Architecture and Town Planning (1967) how Howland inspected Bethlehem's Gemeinhaus, one of the largest log buildings in the country. Howland surveyed the log structure in great detail before it was demolished, very much as we are doing with his beloved Sayre Hall, where he began his architectural studies.

Beyond learning about German Expressionism and classical music, Thompson also participated in a two-week archaeological expedition. In the summer of 1910, he joined History Professor Olin G. Libby in surveying Native American sites along the Missouri River. "We met at Bismarck. The party consisted of Dr. Libby, an Indian chief named Holding Eagle, his son Jim Holding Eagle, Francis Templeton, a U.N.D. student whose home was in Grand Forks, and myself. We were equipped with a farm wagon, two horses, two tents and camping equipment, feed for the horses, and food for ourselves. Jim Holding Eagle was driver and caretaker of the horses. When camping time came, we all pitched in and helped put up the tents."

It is exciting to have such granular information about the life of an academic building from its first occupant. I look forward to see how the biographical account intersects with the material survey. It is astounding to me that within those spaces of Sayre Hall, a young mid-western student could entertain German Expressionist colors and Native American sites under the same roof.

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College and University 1908 North Dakota

Bill Caraher, my partner in many writing crimes (Punk Archaeology, Man Camps, Refugee Archaeology), began a salvage archaeology project on his campus and kindly invited me to collaborate. The issue is this handsome 1908 Beaux Arts building that will be torn down this June. Our task is to archaeologically document as much as we can before demolition. Bill has set up a one-credit class for his students to carry out the documentation. What I hope to contribute is the architectural context. Research began this morning, and I will share some preliminary thoughts.

In 1905, Red River Valley University, a Methodist College in Wahpeton, North Dakota, moved to Grand Forks in an interesting arrangement of auxiliary co-existence with the public University of North Dakota. Red River Valley University was at the verge of economic collapse so the merger with UND was partly financial. It was also motivated by the demographic strength of Methodists among a predominant Lutheran landscape. More interesting is the desire for a science-driven public university to bring to its campus a liberal arts college and create a dependency of arts and sciences. As Louis Menand has argued in The Marketplace of Ideas (2010), liberal arts education in America was invented in order to directly serve the needs of a professionalizing higher education. The liberal arts became the filtering mechanism for professionalization. There was no binary choice between the arts and the sciences; the arts were created as a prerequisite (and albeit inferior) filter for technical specialization. Changing its identity on the new campus, the old Methodist college became an autonomous Wesley College within UND. The coexistence survived until 1963 when it was fully incorporated into the university. 

The two buildings that made up Wesley College were constructed in 1908, with expansions in 1930. Robertson-Sayre Hall and Corwin-Larimore Hall are Beaux Arts buildings in yellow brick and pronounced roof lines. Hundreds of colleges in the U.S. employed this style, following the success of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, the establishment of a Beaux Arts curriculum, and the City Beautiful movement. More locally, however, the 1908 buildings represent a break from the 1891 identity of a Methodist college, represented by the architecture of the abandoned Old Main in Wahpeton (photo below). They are also distinct from the Collegiate Gothic identity embraced by UND in the 1920s. After leaving Wahpeton, Red River University sold its grounds to the State School of Sciences in 1905, so Old Main turned from a Methodist college to a technical university, as it survives to this day (in 2015 the ND State School of Sciences renovated Old Main).

My first reading of the architecture of Robertson-Sayre and Corwin-Larimore is twofold. On the one hand, they embrace the general fashion of campus architecture, the period between 1893 and 1924 when the Beaux Arts reigned supreme. On the other hand, they assert a liberal arts collegiate identity in contrast to the technical university. It will be important to explore the Methodist connection, since Methodist colleges were pioneers in educational reform. After all, Oberlin College was radical in its admissions of African Americans and women based on its Methodist mission. If we were to point to the premier flagship of Methodist collegiate architecture, it would be Cass Gilbert's transformation of Oberlin College from a stone campus into a neoclassical campus. 

Cass Gilbert's Cox Building above (1915) or the Allen Museum (1917) are arguably more refined versions of a Beaux Arts (with Romanesque flourishes to bridge with the older campus identity). 

The architect of the two North Dakota buildings was a New Yorker. A. Wallace McRae in only known for his house designs that were published in contemporary journals like American Architect and Architectural Record around 1923-1925. Why would Grand Forks reach so far beyond its typical source of architects (either local or from Minneapolis)? My suspicion is a common arrangement for the period, where a metropolitan architect submitted designs that were carried out by a local firm. Built on codified architectural modules, the Beaux Arts style lend itself to mass production. It was during this time that large firms build national practices with the help of a newly professionalized staff of draftsmen. The comparison with Cass Gilbert will be interesting here, since he began his practice in Minneapolis before going to New York.

To simply talk about style, however, is just scratching the surface. UND's archives contains building specs that address the material source of construction. It is amazing, for instance, that Mercer Moravian Tiles were brought all the way from Doyleston, Pennsylvania for the floors. The granular study of the building will allow interesting insights on the East Coast-North Dakota emerging interdependencies. 

What I hope to do in the architectural analysis is to establish the norms for campus architecture in 1908 with a special focus on Methodist institutions. As Michael Lewis has shown in his survey of The Gothic Revival (2002), the Methodists quickly abandoned their anti-formal sensibilities of tent retreats and communitarian architecture. By the 1880s, they had fully embraced the formalistic Gothic style that was once unique to their counterparts, the Episcopalians. The sectarian distinctiveness of the Methodists (and their Second Great Awakening legacy) had architecturally disappeared by 1908. 

I hope we find some material articulation of the dominant conflicts in American education ca. 1900. These conflicts have not gone away. After all, the UND Buildings will be torn down to construct a newer vision of the curriculum. I hope we will address three conflicts: public university v. private college, science-technology v. liberal arts curricula, and secular v. religious values. 

I end with the very mission statement of the merger between Wesley College and UND presented by the President of UND in his address of the annual conference in Grand Forks.  In his March 1900 speech, Webster Merrifield laid out the intellectual and practical benefits of the merger:

“Whereas. The state university is in theory the university of all the people of the state, and is supported by the taxes of the members of the several denominations, as well as by the other citizens of the state, it would seem to be appropriate and fitting that the churches of the several denomination in the state should avail themselves of the privileges which belong to their members as citizens of the state, and should use, to whatever extent may seem desirable in the conduct of their education work, the facilities afforded by the state university. It is recognized that the state university is a civic institution and has for its mission the training of the youth of the state for efficient service as its citizens. It is recognized, also, that the distinctive object of the church is maintaining schools of its own is to secure trained leadership in religious and denominational work. There is, therefore, logically, no conflict between their respective missions, for the same young people are to serve in both these capacities. These two missions being in no sense antagonistic, but supplementary, it would seem the part of wise economy that these two education agencies should avail themselves, so far as possible, of the facilities and appliances of each other in the working out of their respective missions, keeping always in view the principle of separation of the church and state in so far as regards the control and expenditure of the financial resources of each." 

Quoted in Wallace N. Stearns, “History of the Red River Valley University,” State of North Dakota Collections of the State Historical Society of North Dakota 2 (1908), pp. 171-178.

Texas (inside) versus North Dakota (outside) man camp insulation

The North Dakota Man Camp Project had a productive research trip a couple of weeks ago, where we documented evidence of abandonment and scaling-down (see here). This phenomenon corresponds with other oil fields, where the decrease of oil prices, exaggerated further by the Iran deal, has caused a clear decline. It's in this general context that Karnes County, Texas, made the news this Sunday: Clifford Kraus, "Sinking Oil Prices Are Lowering Boom in Texas," The New York Times (Aug. 15, 2015), A1, A3.

The article included a photo of an oil worker walking out of his RV. See photo here. This has become a standard oil boom image, partially canonized by Kyle Cassidy (landscape view, right frame cuts through the middle of RV, resident walking or standing at entrance). 

Beyond its human content, the New York Times photograph highlights strategies of vernacular architecture. I did a sketch above to illustrate a subtle detail from the photo, the use of reflective insulation on the windows (marked in black). Whereas in North Dakota this material is placed on the outside of the RV, in Texas it is placed on the inside of the RV. The same material (available at any construction store) insulates against the cold in North Dakota and the heat in Texas. This is one among many regional variations.

I quote some relevant passages by Clifford Kraus below that make the man camp situation in Texas similar to that of North Dakota.

Workers whom migrated from far and wide to find work here, chasing newfound oil riches, are being laid off, deserting their recreational vehicle parks and going home. Hey farmers who became instant millionaires on royalty checks for their land have suddenly fallen behind on payments for new tractors they bought when cash was flowing. Scores of mobile steel tanks and portable toilets used at the ubiquitous wells are stacked, unused, along county roads. 'Everybody is waiting for doomsday,' said Vi Malone the Karnes County treasurer.

Just five years ago, Karnes County was a speck in the oil patch, its production a rounding error in a state historically tied to oil. Then came hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and teh sure in oil production it unleashed. Crumbling towns here reinvented themselves with new restaurants, markets and hotels as money and jobs poured in....

O Young Building, Grand Forks ND

Cast iron transformed commercial architecture in 19th-century American cities. Affording greater span for less footprint, they increased the space for windows and window-shopping. In corner properties, the iron column was capable of supporting the entire weight of the residential upper floors and open up the corner to the public, placing the entrance diagonally to the corner, and allow passage and view from both streets. Cutting the corner gave back space to the public street (experientially but not legally) and literally syphoned the shopper into the store. Decorative detail on the prefabricated iron post, moreover, attracted attention the store.

The "corner store" is, thus, an iconic installation in any19th-century American city. But since this paradigm does not work anymore, many of the old corner stores have closed their original public offering to increase their private real estate. When American cities went into depression in the 1960s, the iron posts stopped being maintained, rusted, and generally proved inefficient. So few of them actually survive in situ.

This morning, I took a walk through Grand Forks' beautiful main street (3rd Street) to see a beautiful iron corner post on 2 S 3rd Street and Demers. Originally the "O Young Building" it sat on a prime location with Demers Street crossing the Red Rive into Minnesota. The post had no information about the foundry that produced it (sometimes they are stamped) but, I would guess, it was manufactured in Minneapolis. It is divided into two parts with triple fluting, a base, capital, and a simple middle block decorated with disks. The pier is decorated on only two of its four sides, which suggests that originally the corner was not fully open but must have had some adjacent framing.

The entrance to the upstairs residential floors is on the other side of the facade and it is framed by decorated piers that match the iron post. From the distance, it looks like they are iron, too, but they are not. They are made out of wood, but carved so to match the iron prototype in the corner. This is pretty interesting. The carpenter (surely local) is completing here an architectural composition whose vocabulary was established by the foundry. Painting both white makes them indistinguishable. I was excited to discover this bi-materiality. On the East Coast and other midwestern cities, decorative details of this period are made in pressed zinc and do away with the carpenter altogether.

The Young store had an iron post on its other back corner, but it has been replaced with a newer steel column. A staircase leading to the basement on Demers Street features another iron element, a beautiful post for the railing, most likely manufactured by the same foundry (below):

Artesia

Wil Hylton's "The Shame of America's Family Detention Camps" in The New York Times Magazine this weekend (Feb. 4, 2015) came while editing our own essay on the man camps of North Dakota. June Carlos Llorca's photo "Children entering a dormitory at Artesia Family Residential Center in New Mexico last September," in particular, made me think of the similarities between the man camps we are studying and the federal detention center. The photograph gives enough factual information of the residential unit. I tried to extract a ground-plan and elevation from the photograph in order to turn photography into architectural evidence. Given the standardized sizes of windows and cladding, one could easily replicate the exact dimensions of the residential unit.

After speculating on the unit's ground plan, I thought it might be possible to produce an entire camp map using Google Earth. Adrian Meyers has given some guidelines on using Google Earth as an archaeological tool, see his pioneering remote sensing of Guantanamo Bay:

Meyers, Adrian. 2010. “Camp Delta, Google Earth and the Ethics of Remote Sensing in Archaeology,” World Archaeology 42, pp. 455-467

I confess that I didn't go very far with the remote sensing exercise, partially because I didn't have enough corroborative information to fine-tune the coordinates. After half an hour of browsing the landscape north of Artesia for images of a camp, I gave up on Google Earth. But I do hope someone takes ti up from here.