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Images
of the University of Delaware
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The University
of Delaware Library Postcard Collection
contains over ninety images of the Newark
campus. These postcards record not only
the appearance of some buildings that
are today changed, but they also illustrate
a story of two small colleges, Delaware
College and its affiliate, the Women’s
College. Their particular development
created the campus as it appears today.
With the facilities of Delaware College
clustered around the Old College building
north of Main Street, and the Women’s
College buildings located nearly a mile
to the south, the two schools would
become one university largely through
the negotiation of architecture. As
buildings designed for shared use by
both Colleges were built in the area
between the two campuses, coeducation
gradually replaced single-sex education,
and the two schools became the University
of Delaware. Click on any image below for more information and other views. |
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Old College between 1902 and 1907 |
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| The
University of Delaware traces its beginnings
to 1743 when the Reverend Mr. Francis
Alison opened a school for boys at New
London, Pennsylvania, which later relocated
to Newark and became Newark Academy.
The trustees of Newark Academy desired
to establish the first degree-granting
college in the State of Delaware, and
eventually monies raised from a State
lottery paid for the first building.
Then called Newark College and known
today simply as “Old College,” the building
was erected in 1833-34. It was the school’s
only facility for over fifty years,
and contained the oratory, recitation
rooms, faculty and student housing,
dining room, and library. Charles Bulfinch of Boston, the architect of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., was chosen as designer of the Newark College building. The trustees accepted his plan in 1826, but for reasons unclear in the trustees’ minutes, his design was not built. Winslow Lewis, a lighthouse builder also from Boston and perhaps an acquaintance of Bulfinch’s, designed and oversaw the construction of Old College, the first major Greek Revival structure in the state of Delaware. Old College was originally a three-story cruciform brick structure with a centered portico in front of the two upper stories. Each wing had five bays separated by pilasters, with a single doorway opening onto the portico. Four unfluted Doric columns supported the triangular pediment of the portico. It stands north of Main Street at the intersection of South College Avenue and is today, as it was then, approached by a walk lined with a double row of European linden trees. A newspaper article from 1833 described the anticipated final appearance of the building as having “end buildings with porticos of four ionic columns each.” These would remain unbuilt for nearly three-quarters of a century. A Gothic style belfry was added in 1852 above the central portico, somewhat out of sorts with the original Greek Revival design. |
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Old College between 1902 and 1917 |
Old College between 1902 and 1917 |
Old College after 1917 |
| In 1902, the end porticos were finally added on both wings, but with fluted Doric columns rather than Ionic, as originally intended. In 1917 extensive interior and exterior remodeling included removing the belfry and the fluting of the central portico’s Doric columns to correspond with those of the end porticos. The Delaware Postcard Collection has two cards showing Old College with both its Gothic belfry and the end porticos. Those cards, therefore, may be dated to the period between 1902 and 1917. Several other postcards depict the building as we recognize it today, and thus must have been published after 1917. | ||
| A Land-Grant School: Renewed Life for Delaware College | ||
| In 1859, the trustees of the school now called Delaware College were forced to close its doors due to extreme financial burden. Happily, Delaware College reopened in 1870 as a land-grant college under the Morrill Act. Since Morrill Act funds from the sale of land could not be used for buildings, the president and trustees of the College appealed to the General Assembly of the state legislature for help. The state responded with enough money to finance Recitation Hall, which was built to the east of Old College in 1891-1892. Designed by Furness, Evans Company of Philadelphia and built by Joseph T. Willis, the new three-story building housed classrooms and offices. It also had an auditorium on the third floor where commencement exercises and social events were held. Recitation Hall replaced Old College as the center of the College’s social life. Between 1888 and 1896, six buildings including Recitation Hall were built on the campus, all clustered to the north and east of Old College. | ||
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Recitation
Hall
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| Literary societies were a social and intellectual tradition dating from the earliest years of the College to the first decade of the twentieth century. Placing more emphasis on the intellectual development of their members than twentieth-century Greek-letter fraternities, these societies encouraged practice in public speaking and writing through oral debates and essay competitions. At Delaware College, the two rival societies were Delta Phi and the Athenean Society, both established by 1835 (there is some controversy over which existed first!). Nearly every student belonged to one or the other. Joseph Cleaver writes in his diary: | ||
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| The
societies were assigned meeting rooms
in Old College, and with members’
dues and alumni gifts each society amassed
a small library. These libraries may
have contained 1,500 books each, and
it was generally boasted that the literary
societies’ libraries made up for
the poverty of the College library. Joseph Cleaver’s diary reveals that the activities of the societies were taken with a seriousness that at least matched, and arguably surpassed, that of the college course work. The frequency with which the societies, their meetings, and debate topics are mentioned in his diary further reveals the important and special role they played in the lives of the students. An entry from Cleaver’s diary for October 22, 1853 reads as follows: |
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| Three Greek-letter fraternities were established at Delaware College some time before 1910, which probably hastened the demise of the literary societies. Also, many more students were commuting to the College than fifty years earlier, and it was likely difficult for commuters to devote the time on campus for the societies’ meetings. A postcard in the Collection shows a group portrait of Delta Phi on the steps of Old College. A beautiful gelatin-silver photographic card, postmarked 1906, it is probably one of the last of such group portraits because the literary societies did not survive into the second decade of the century. We don’t know for certain the intended use of such a postcard, but we can imagine it being sent by students to friends and family back home to showcase one’s achievements at school, and also to alumni who might be moved to lend support to the society. | ||
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Delta-Phi Fraternity on the steps of Old College |
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| A campus building with a diverse history is the John Watson Evans house, also formerly called Purnell Hall and now known as Alumni Hall, located on Main Street to the east of Old College and Recitation Hall. A two-story-plus-attic brick structure three bays wide, the original building of around 1820-30 is two rooms deep, with a two-story brick wing at the rear. A simplified Federal style building with Flemish-bond brickwork, it was purchased by the College in 1903 and served as a fraternity, and has at different times housed the departments of English and History, as well as the library. There are several images of the John Watson Evans house in the Postcard Collection, showing it belonging to the Kappa Alpha fraternity (one of the first fraternities at the College), and later when it was called Purnell Hall. The Greek-Revival portico on the eastern end of the house is a later addition, and it is interesting to note that views of this building, including these postcards, are typically taken from the southwest, emphasizing the original structure and de-emphasizing, even obscuring, the later addition. | ||
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John Watson Evans House (formerly the Kappa Alpha fraternity house) |
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The
Women’s College Aside from a brief period in the College’s early history when it was coeducational (between 1872 and 1885), no female students attended the school until 1914, when the Women’s College was established. The president and trustees of Delaware College governed the Women’s College, but it had its own dean, faculty, and buildings. The College purchased a nineteen-acre farm about three-quarters of a mile to the south of the Delaware College buildings. An architect from New Castle, Lausatt Rogers, designed the first two buildings of the Women’s College, which were called simply Residence Hall and Science Hall. These two buildings today retain a sense of their original use, as Residence Hall (now Warner Hall) is the only all-female dormitory on the campus, and Science Hall (now Robinson Hall) houses the University’s graduate program in Marine Studies. The long, two-and-a-half story buildings were constructed side by side, similar in size and shape to give a sense of uniformity and symmetry. Together they present an unimposing elegance. |
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Warner Hall (originally Residence Hall) |
Robinson Hall (originally Science Hall) |
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Robinson
(Science) Hall was renamed in 1940 after
Dean Winifred J. Robinson, dean of the
Women’s College from 1914 to 1938.
With a doctorate in botany from Columbia
University and former positions as professor
at Vassar College and Dean of Women
at the University of Wisconsin, Dean
Robinson came to the Women’s College
with a firm belief in single-sex education.
Dean Robinson’s chief interest
was providing women with an education
that would prepare them for the types
of positions that were most likely to
be open to them, that is, teachers,
social workers, and home economists.
She wrote, “the essential advantages
of the separate college organization
for women [are] providing training for
administrative work and placing emphasis
on courses leading to appointments open
to women, with the added advantages
of opening new courses to women students.”
While Dean Robinson believed that some
courses of study could be taught identically
to both genders, others should be focused
to the different needs of female students.
For example, chemistry should concentrate
on the chemical composition of food,
which was of more practical value to
women as future homemakers or nutritionists.
In addition to general classrooms, Science
(Robinson) Hall also contained a food-science
laboratory and textile laboratory. Warner (Residence) Hall was renamed in 1936 for Emalea Pusey Warner, who led the campaign for the creation of the Women’s College, and later in 1928 was the first woman to serve on the board of trustees of the University of Delaware. Warner Hall was designed to include large, well-furnished spaces appropriate for social events. Dances were held in the Hilarium, which is featured in a postcard. The large room was decorated with wicker furniture, a piano, a large wooden and glass cabinet, and a finely carved fireplace. Students’ rooms, by contrast, were small so as to encourage study and discourage socializing. Dean Robinson herself lived in Residence Hall and required that all faculty of the Women’s College do the same, as well as take their meals with the students. The dining room, though located in the basement, was furnished tastefully, featured a fireplace, and was equipped for formal dining. |
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The Hilarium |
Women's College dining room |
| Athletics The opening of a new men’s gymnasium to the north of Old College in 1906 coincided with the first men’s varsity basketball team at the College. Robeson Lea Perot of Philadelphia was hired as the architect of the gymnasium. The building had a running track suspended from roof trusses, forming a balcony above the main floor, and a small swimming pool in the basement, which was completed in 1913. Athletics received a tremendous boost upon the inauguration of Joe Frazer Field, sponsored in memorial for Joseph Heckart Frazer by his parents. Frazer was a 1903 graduate of the College and a civil engineer who had made a fortune while quite young, only to die of influenza at the age of twenty-nine. The athletic field was laid out on eight-and-a-half acres of land to the northeast of the campus that had been owned by the College since 1890. Dedicated in June of 1913, the area provided a football field, a baseball diamond, a cinder track, tennis courts, and the space to park one hundred automobiles. A memorial gateway to Joe Frazer Field was erected directly to the east of the men’s gymnasium. The gateway does not appear, however, in any images of the gymnasium building in the Postcard Collection. The postcards of the gymnasium, then, must have been produced between 1906 and 1913. |
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The Men's Gymnasium |
Joe Frazier Field |
The Women's College Gymnasium |
| In December of 1931 the gymnasium at the Women’s College opened, now called Hartshorn after Beatrice Hartshorn, the director of women’s physical education at the University from 1925 until 1962. No longer a gym, the building is now occupied by the University’s professional theater training program. The gymnasium, built by the architect Louis Jellade, made it possible for women to receive the degree of Bachelor of Science in Physical Education. Students following the course of Elementary Education also were required to take physical education classes to learn games and sports to teach to children. Delaware women did not participate in intercollegiate competitions because Professor Hartshorn and Dean Robinson considered them unsuitable for women; therefore team sports such as basketball were strictly intramural. | ||
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Land Between the Colleges: Plans for
the Development of the Green The period between 1915 and 1930 was one of much-needed architectural growth for both the campuses of Delaware College and the Women’s College, which were quickly outgrowing their facilities. The newly built Women’s College buildings soon proved inadequate for the growing student body. Enrollment of women increased from 133 in 1919-20 to roughly 300 a decade later. In addition to Sussex and New Castle Residence Halls, built in 1916 and 1926 respectively, the Women’s College maintained three temporary dormitories. Kent Dining Hall (for women) also went up in 1926. |
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Kent
Dining Hall
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| The
first step towards closing the physical
gap between Delaware College and the
Women’s College was the anonymous
gift of Pierre S. du Pont in 1915 of
$218,000 to purchase the forty-acre
tract of land between the two campuses
and remove any standing buildings. This
was his first of several gifts towards
the development of the Green that eventually
totaled over one million dollars. In 1916, the University began its relationship with the Philadelphia architectural firm of Day and Klauder, which was hired as consulting architects for Delaware College. Frank Miles Day and Charles Z. Klauder had earned their reputations as college architects through their work at Princeton and elsewhere. Day and Klauder created a plan for the development of new buildings on the land between the schools. This plan would be filled in steadily by funds contributed by P. S. du Pont and enriched by state support for the Women’s College. |
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| The first two buildings executed under the plans of Day and Klauder were Harter Hall, a men’s dormitory, and Wolf Hall, the chemistry building. Rodney Sharp, chairman of planning and development and brother-in-law of P. S. du Pont, suggested the names of both buildings to commemorate two of his most esteemed professors at Delaware College. Wolf Hall was named for Dr. Theodore R. Wolf, a talented professor of chemistry who had come to the College in 1871 at the age of twenty-one with a Ph.D. from Heidelberg. At the time of his arrival, he was the only faculty on campus with university training, and later he was named State Chemist, adding both to his own prestige and the College’s. Wolf Hall is a three-and-a-half story building with extended wings, its distinctive feature being the charming molded swags that surround a round window on its pediment. | ||
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Wolf
Hall
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| Memorial
Library In January of 1925, the Memorial Library opened as the first building to serve students of both Delaware College and the Women’s College. Walter Hullihen, who became president of the schools in 1920, initiated the move towards shared facilities. He successfully persuaded the faculty and trustees to reorganize the colleges as two parts of a total educational complex called the University of Delaware. Still essentially offering single-sex education, this measure was the first in restructuring the two colleges into one. The library collections at Delaware College were continually moving and struggling for space. During the era of the literary societies at Delaware College, there existed three small library collections in separate rooms of Old College. In 1896, the general library of over 7,000 volumes was moved to the second floor of Recitation Hall. At this time departmental libraries were kept in the recitation rooms, where students and professors could have better access to them. There was no professional librarian; instead, the position rotated among members of the faculty. In 1909 the library moved into a building in which it was the sole occupant, the John Watson Evans house on Main Street. Wilbur Owen Sypherd, a professor of English, served as librarian and was able to keep the library open until 10 p.m. with the help of an assistant and student aides. Just seven years later, however, the library moved again, to a building across Main Street at the southeast corner of Main Street and South College Avenue. This building had once been the Delaware House, an early hostelry, and had most recently been a printing shop. The frame building posed a fire threat, however, and it was still not large enough for the library’s holdings. Some books had to be stored in attics in inconvenient corners of the campus. The library of the Women’s College, housed in a single room on the second floor of Science Hall, was also brimming over with 5,000 volumes by 1925. Thus a new library was one of the major needs of Delaware College when Day and Klauder were drawing up their plans, and indeed a library is shown on their plans precisely where Memorial Library was finally built. As far as can be determined, the idea of a Memorial Library to commemorate the Delaware men and agencies that shared in the victory of the first World War originated in 1918 with Samuel Chiles Mitchell, the president who preceded Hullihen. Mitchell envisioned alcoves and tables bearing the names of those commemorated. He believed that this would bring glory both to the school and to the entire state, and its prominent position on the campus would serve Delaware better than numerous lesser monuments scattered throughout the state. Nonetheless, the library was not built until Hullihen’s administration. Rodney Sharp led the fundraising campaign, which, despite rising inflation in the early 1920s, had earned enough money to have the building erected by 1925. During winter vacation of 1924-25 the books from the Women’s College library, the old hostelry/printing shop, plus some 5,000 other volumes stored in Recitation Hall, were moved into the new Memorial Library. The internal and external appearance of Memorial Library, now called Memorial Hall, is much different today than its original form. The wings as originally built were flat and low, giving them a stubby, squat look. The central portion was much narrower than it is today, consisting only of the memorial hall with entrances from the north and south. These two entrances probably were designed with an ideological purpose in mind, because the Memorial Library was the first shared building of the two Colleges. The north entrance invited the men of Delaware College, coming from their campus north of the library, while the south entrance invited the women of Women’s College, coming from their campus south of the library. The original structure of the building can be observed particularly well in several postcards; one, for example, presents the building from the side, revealing a low wing and small, basically rectangular, center portion. |
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Memorial Library (now Memorial Hall) |
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| The interior of Memorial Library featured (as it does today) a central hall with four bronze tablets on the facing walls bearing the names of Delaware’s 262 war dead, as well as a book of names and flags of the Allied nations. The library stacks were in the basement, periodicals and offices were in the west wing, a small art gallery under the dome was reached via a broad stairway, and the east wing terminated in the main reading room. The men and women apparently practiced voluntary segregation in the reading room, with women occupying the south side and men occupying the north side of this room, maintaining the traditional geographic division of the two campuses. | ||
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Memorial Library after the 1939 expansion |
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After
only fifteen years, the library already
needed more space. A flood in 1937
sent out an alarm that the stacks
should be removed from the basement.
In 1939, the library received additional
space by extending the east and west
wings to the north and south, and
raising the flat roof to an arch with
double chimneys, improving the previously
flat appearance of the wings. The
library also received an extension
to the southern part of the central
section, providing more space for
books. Five seminar rooms were set
up in the basement for advanced and
graduate classes. A view of the library
after its extension can be seen in
a photographic postcard showing the
front of the building with its Ionic
portico, central dome, and extended
wings with the prominent chimney stacks
at the ends.
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Buildings on the Green Shortly after Memorial Library was built, Rodney Sharp made his first major gift to the University in the form of an auditorium, named Mitchell Hall after the University’s former president. Constructed on the west side of the Green, it remains one of the most attractive buildings on the campus. On each side of the building, six pilasters with delicate capitals lie beneath an entablature and pediment that frame the central dome. Klauder, the architect, consulted members of the Yale department of drama about the design. In the end, it was decided that Mitchell Hall would serve as auditorium, concert hall, and theater. |
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East facade of Brown Hall |
West facade of Brown Hall |
| A new men’s dormitory was erected in 1940, named Brown Hall after its benefactor, Fletcher Brown. Brown Hall faced Harter Hall, another men’s dormitory on the Green just south of Main Street. It contained game rooms, an apartment for a dormitory director, an office, and a wing of apartments suitable for faculty or graduate students. This handsome building must have been a charming addition to the northern part of the Green when it was put up, providing a welcome balance to Harter Hall, which had stood alone for over twenty years. The Postcard Collection has views of Brown Hall from both its west and east facing sides, the east side (facing the Green) with elaborate marble doorways, and the west side featuring the simple fenestration also present on the east side. | |
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Evans
Hall, Brown Laboratory, and Memorial
Library
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| In a 1937 letter to Fletcher Brown, Charles Klauder wrote of his involvement with the architecture of the University of Delaware campus. He wrote, “For many years it has been my delight, and it was also the late Mr. Day’s—that in Delaware College we had a splendid opportunity to develop a superior internal campus. This is in part now accomplished by your gift of a Chemistry Laboratory (now Brown Laboratory) and I hoped that a building on the west opposite would be forthcoming (later built, called University Hall and now Hullihen Hall).” Klauder envisioned brick arches connecting the three buildings forming the southern end of the Green. Klauder’s desire for a unified ending to the designs that he and his partner had begun more than twenty years earlier were realized in 1940, when Hullihen Hall, the extended Memorial Library, and the Brown Laboratory were linked by brick archways. In a postcard featuring Evans Hall, the Chemistry Building (Brown Laboratory), and Memorial Library, we can peer through the trees and see the open vista and the not-yet-extended west wing of the library. Only a few years later that vista would be closed by connecting arches to complete the buildings on the southern end of the Green, and symbolically close the period of remarkable architectural expansion on the Delaware campus. | |
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Selected Bibliography Eberlein, Harold Donaldson and Cortlandt V. D. Hubbard. Historic Houses and Buildings of Delaware. Dover, Delaware: Public Archives Commission, 1962. Hoffecker, Carol E. Beneath Thy Guiding Hand: A History of Women at the University of Delaware. Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware, 1994. Hoffecker, Carol E. and John A. Munroe. Books, Bricks, and Bibliophiles: The University of Delaware Library. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984. Handy, Egbert G. and Jas. L. Vallandigham, Jr. Newark, Delaware, Past and Present. Newark: Delaware Ledger Print, 1882. Lewis, William Ditto, ed. “The Diary of a Student at Delaware College, 1853-1854.” Delaware Notes 24 (1951): 1-87. Lewis, William Ditto. “University of Delaware: Ancestors, Friends and Neighbors.” Delaware Notes 34 (1961) 1-242. Meisel, Jacqueline C. Old College, The First Building at the University of Delaware: Its Origins and Development. Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Delaware, 1971. Munroe, John A. The University of Delaware: A History. Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware, 1986. Online version. Robinson, Winifred J. “History of the Women’s College of the University of Delaware 1914-1938.” Delaware Notes 20 (1947): 5-69. Vallandigham, Edward N. Fifty Years of Delaware College. Newark, Delaware: Kells, [1920?]. |
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Written by Erika Suffern August 2001 |
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Questions,
Comments, or Problems?
Copyright © 2006 University of Delaware Library |