 I'm Bob Wilhelm, Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and I want to thank you for joining us today for what is now the second Nebraska lecture for 2019. This presentation is especially, well I guess I'd say special, because it comes during Charter Week, so we have a whole week of celebration and remembrance, reflection, to celebrate our 150th anniversary. And the Chancellor's Distinguished Lecture Series has become a monthly event now for 2019. Typically we do this a couple of times a year, but we now have one every month and I invite you to join with us every month to hear the lectures and to celebrate our university's heritage and our role in the state. The Nebraska lectures have been designed and carried out for a long time. They're an interdisciplinary lecture series. They're aimed at uniting the university's community with the greater community of Lincoln, and to help both celebrate the intellectual life of the university and the intellectual life of our community. So all of you, and we're really pleased that you're here with us today. The presentations highlight our faculty's excellence in research and in creative activity. This series is sponsored by the University of Nebraska Lincoln Research Council in cooperation with the Office of the Chancellor, the Office of Research and Economic Development, that's me, and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, known as ALI. And I want to make a special welcome to the many, I think, ALI members that we have here today. So glad you're here. Thanks. And I think I want to give you a little bit of applause. I also want to thank NET for serving as a partner in today's lecture. Because of NET's expertise, the lecture today will include a virtual reality component. Which you'll hear about a little bit later. Thank you to Steve Colby, Associate Professor in the Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film for learning the equipment that makes today's VR experience possible. Let's also give special thanks to the Humanities Nebraska and its Executive Director, Chris Sumerich, for helping sponsor the lecture this year. Particularly with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we've been able to expand the lecture series for this milestone anniversary year. And we're also creating podcasts of these presentations for historical purposes and to help engage new audiences further on to learn about the people, the places, the events that have played significant roles in Nebraska's history. More information about these podcasts will be available as we develop the series. You'll hear more from us about this. I also want to recognize the University's Research Council, which includes faculty from a broad range of disciplines at the University of Nebraska. The council solicits nominations for faculty to present at the Nebraska lectures on the basis of their major accomplishments and also the lecture's abilities to explain their work. So selection, this selection as a Nebraska lecture is the highest recognition that the council bestows on individual faculty members. So quite an honor for the speaker today and we appreciate all of the work of the council. Today's, let me see I've got a few different logistics issues before I get going here. The lecture is being web streamed live. So I want to welcome anybody that's joining us online and also through Facebook Live. For social media users, you can comment in real time during the lecture. The hashtag for today's lecture is hashtag N-E-B-L-E-C-T-U-R-E. So hashtag neb lecture. And then I also want to talk a little bit about the format. So we're going to have the lecture we're going to see some really interesting visuals. And after the lecture, Dr. Effie Athanusopolis, I've practiced this so many times. Dr. Effie Athanusopolis is a member of the university's research council and associate professor of anthropology, classics and religious studies will moderate a question and answer session with the audience. So following the Q&A session, we'll also announce the winner of our N-150 giveaway. So we've got a special process. You've got to stay to win. So I'll look for you to stay for the end of the lecture to receive your prize. And also we'll have a reception following the lecture here in the Champions Club. The other thing that I want to make sure that you appreciate is that everybody has got a chance for the prize as well. We have a table in the back with the N-150 book. And I think that you want to take a look at that while you're here. Also when you sit down I think you might also have in your possession a copy of K. Logan Peters book The University of Nebraska-Lincoln. So this book has pictorial history, lots of different things to learn about the campus. We're pleased that we could share that with you here today. So that's all of my logistics. We look forward to this lecture. And now I want to welcome Chancellor Roddy Green who will introduce our speaker. Well thank you very much Bob. It's a real pleasure to be here today. It's Charter Week, our 150th anniversary of the University of Nebraska. And it's an exciting week to be alive, right? So we're very, very happy about this anniversary that we're celebrating and welcome to the Champions Club. And thanks to the Nebraska Alumni Association for hosting us here today in this great facility. We've got a really special lecture for you. I've been talking about this as K. Logan Peters knows for a number of months ever since I found out that we had this idea or this possibility of being able to feel University Hall. And to feel that what it must have been like to be here through this great little model that you saw in the back when you came in today. So it's a real pleasure to be here. I also want to reiterate to you our thanks to Humanities Nebraska and to the National Endowment for the Humanities that's allowing us to really do this whole series of 12 lectures through this year. I see Charlene Barron sitting here. She was our inaugural lecturer last month, gave a great presentation on the history of the Nebraska Unicameral and what that has meant to our state moving forward. It's a real pleasure for me to be able to introduce the speaker for today's lecture to you. Our lecturer is K. Logan Peters, Professor of Libraries and Art and Architecture Librarian here at the University. K is going to walk us through some of the University's early architectural history including the University of Nebraska's original four block campus. We talked about that last month in the State of the University that we originated here as a four block campus when Lincoln was just barely a town in 1869. During her nearly 40 year career at the University, K has become an expert on the buildings and history of our campus. In 1987 she became head of the architecture library where she regularly fielded student inquiries about the history of campus buildings. These requests combined with her love for architecture drove K to begin researching UNL's architectural history and campus development. Her work culminated in 2008 with the launch of a website devoted to the first hundred years of building and campus growth at UNL. The website has become an important resource for our campus and the community. It also paved the way for her 2017 book that you heard referenced a moment ago that was on your chair, the University of Nebraska Lincoln that's an illustrated history if you will of the University. In addition to her leadership of the architecture library K is deeply involved on our campus and in the professional community. As a member of the University Speakers Bureau she talks to a wide range of groups about the people, places and events that are important to our University's history. She also regularly leads historical tours of campus and appears on local media outlets to share her expertise. During her career she served as president of the Central Plains Chapter of the Art Library Society, the Association of Architecture School Librarians and the Preservation Association of Lincoln. She is a recipient of the Preservation Association's Great Commoner Award which recognizes achievements in historic preservation education. K is also a proud Husker alumna. Big round of applause for that. She remains closely connected to our students on campus. Since 2002 she's received six grants through our UCARE program, the undergraduate creative activities and research experiences program. This allowed her to team up with Husker graduates to conduct research on UNL's historical buildings. Last year she connected with some of the University's more veteran students by teaching an ollie course. Many of you here today can relate to that focused on University history. She's also received a People Who Inspire Award from UNL's Mortar Board Honor Society, a group of students as you know who are selected for their excellence in scholarship and academic achievement leadership and service. In a few minutes K is going to present Building Nebraska U, the saga of University Hall and the origins of the modern university. But first you're going to hear from Chad Davis, Nebraska Educational Television's Assistant General Manager for Emerging Media. NET has partnered with K as well as the Johnny Carson School for a film theater and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, the Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and University Libraries to produce a virtual reality tour around the exterior of University Hall. The first building on our campus as you're going to hear about today. NET contributed deep knowledge of this project and platform management, educational content and storytelling to make this presentation possible. So please join me in welcoming Chad Davis. Welcome everybody, online camera, there you go, hi, welcome. NET is always looking for new ways to tell stories and it's core to what we do. Storytelling is the main way we achieve our mission and I think many of you think of NET as television or as radio, but we actually do a considerable amount of work and have for a number of years in interactive on the web and in what we now call Emerging Media. That's the department that I represent, the Emerging Media department. Emerging Media encompasses a number of things and it encompasses virtual reality. Virtual reality has been around for years, it's been the stuff of science fiction, but it's been really buzzy the last two or three years because science is actually now catching up with fiction. There are a number of places, a number of faculty and a number of students who are experimenting, playing, building things in VR all over the campus and about a year ago a group of us started to get together informally, we met down at the bay for coffee and we really were getting together to kind of nerd out on the technology of VR and to talk about just the possibilities and all of this tech is now in our hands, what can we do with it? That's 360 video, that's full immersive environments, we're even talking about augmented reality. And my co-founders on this project, Heather Richards Rosetto from Anthropology and the Center for Digital Research and Humanities and Steve Colby who is with the Carson School of Theater and Film and the Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts, we started to hone in on a couple of different ideas. Heather was talking about doing campus tours with augmented reality to get at some of the anthropological finds that you uncover when you start digging around on actual campus grounds. Steve has an idea about doing sort of virtual or augmented art installations, maybe around the Sheldon or something like that and we were kicking around those different ideas and trying to figure out how to kind of make use of the sense of place. The idea that kind of won out was actually University Hall and its origins are very low tech walking around campus and saw the little marble memento slab, I don't know what you'd call it, that kind of denotes where the building stood and if you've not seen that lately, if you've not seen that, it's a little northeast of Architecture Hall, it's a little northwest of the Sheldon, I think Woods Hall is right next to it. So we started to talk and we started to say wouldn't it be cool in emerging media, like so many of my departmental projects start with the phrase wouldn't it be cool if and so we started saying wouldn't it be cool if we could actually bring back to life the very first building on the University of Nebraska campus and so we took a run at that and Steve do you want to go ahead and grab the headset there and Steve, what you're seeing here is actually a live feed from a computer Steve's got his little controller and golly it moves so this is our virtual reality representation, that's the ground that's the grass, you would be surprised at the lengthy discussion we had about the right type of grass and how high to make it, we originally had it a little higher and it made you feel like you were three feet tall when you were in the headset so we actually had to cut the grass to make it seem normal what you're seeing here tonight is a demo version and it was built off of that model you're seeing in the background I will get into the how based on the questions you guys want to ask during the Q&A so I'm not going to go deep onto that now but Steve's going to just walk around a little bit and show you kind of what it looks like and by walk we mean teleport and you'll see him zap around and the image will change as he changes position while he's doing that just give a couple of thanks because we are going to wrap up in case he's going to come up here in just a second and there will be opportunities to do this later and you all have cards on your seats because these are also apps in the iOS store and Android store so I can download this somewhere, I've got my phone and you can actually put this into a Google Cardboard headset and try it out for yourself, it's a low red version and you can kind of see that as Steve gets closer it starts to look a little marshmallowy and that's why we call this a demo which in tech terms is kind of like saying covering your ass so what we want to do now is kind of tell you a little bit about where we're going in the next year we're at the beginning of a year long project with this we have the target date for ourselves of February 15th 2020 in phase one what we're going to be doing over the next year is working down four different phases and that is making the exterior details a lot more photorealistic as much as the technology will allow we also intend to build out the interior so a year from now you should be able to actually go through one of those doors and walk around the inside that's going to be a bit of a challenge because we have yet to find any photos the garadipes, whatever, of the interior we know from secondary sources that the walls were a kind of reddish brown color we'll get into that in a little bit but we have some challenges ahead of us there we're just going to be working on content, as I said storytelling is key for us so this is really a tech demo but we're going to be putting in hotspots, revealing some of the stories about this building and about the early days of campus life and then we have a little bit of an experiment we like to do with augmented reality and if we can get that to work we will be able to have it so when you are walking around with your phone on campus you can actually kind of get near that spot and see how it would have looked standing there in front of you just using your phone so quick thank you, I want to actually thank the team at NET real fast because you guys should know who these folks are we have not really done a virtual reality project of this scale before and this team is fearless and they do not shy away from a challenge and they're like yeah we'll learn VR we know how to build apps, we know how to build websites, yeah we'll do VR so first Mike Fields who is our lead software developer, Wave Mike Mike built this environment with help from Steve and from Heather Patrick Bate also up in the front he's our graphics specialist specializing in extended reality type graphics Patrick worked with Steve to sort of get this model to a place that is actually looking good as you demo it I want to thank Andrew Wentz, Andrew is here somewhere I don't know where Andrew went but he helped with photogrammetry and Patrick actually took 1500 photos of that model you see back there and that's the basis for this and then I want to thank Melanie Irak who is our project manager on this, Melanie there on the front too, Melanie keeps us all kind of running on schedule, Melanie is the reason why we got up today and came to work and didn't say wait demo, we have a demo so Melanie keeps us on track so thank you for that I also want to just do real fast thank Heather who is like I said one of the founders of this project with Steve and I thanks Steve for being the VR pilot tonight and thank Kay, we didn't start with Kay but you can't do this type of work and not find Kay really really fast and so for me because years and years ago graduated from another Big Ten school, sorry, Big Ten though so we say go Big Red at that Big Ten school so I'll let you guess which one that one is I was a history major and so one of the pleasures for me in working on this project has been to just listen to Kay Dish about campus life and what it was like in the early days of UNL and so you're going to get to experience some of that pleasure right now so nice here, switch speeches I have seen people today I haven't seen in a decade so it's really great to have such a nice crowd and a great honor to be here it's my privilege today to be here to share our university's history with all of you 25 years ago I very innocently began collecting facts here and there about old university buildings as an architecture librarian I would occasionally meet up with a student or a class that wanted to know where a particular building was located or what had become of a particular building why we didn't have any historic buildings to speak of and this information was actually really kind of difficult to find at this time we had kind of a limited interest in the university's history we were between the 100th celebration and we were a long way from this one and we really I'll just say it we had zero appreciation for our old demolished buildings most people didn't know they'd ever existed so I was interested in learning more about the buildings more about how campus grew and why so few of our original structures remained on campus I worked in architecture hall which of course is now the oldest building on campus and I knew its history as a former university library but I wanted to know more about the other buildings about the time I was getting seriously interested and considering something really crazy like writing a book Robert Knoll beat me to it with the publication of Prairie University this was 1995 and he was infinitely more qualified and knowledgeable than I was and I was certain I'd blown my chance his book seemed so comprehensive and I just couldn't imagine what else there was to uncover then I ran into Robert at a library event and he encouraged me to keep digging this is my bad Robert imitation oh my you mustn't let me stop you there is so much more there is so much more and so I kept at it and I'm grateful for Robert's encouragement and he was right there was so much more so let's start at the beginning and talk about how the legendary and now infamous university hall came to be known in the first 15 years of its existence the university clearly the first governor of Nebraska David Butler and members of the state building commission envisioned a great university built upon the principles laid out by the new land grant act of 1862 the building they located and constructed on the original campus was very grand particularly compared to this little dusty little town of Lincoln that was home to perhaps a thousand people in 1869 Lincoln was in its infancy and it was newly named it had no sidewalks no public utilities no brickyard and the railroad had not yet arrived the university building was bigger than the capitol to build such a large and imposing structure was indeed audacious in June of 1869 the state building commission interviewed four architects and they provided plans and explanations after deliberating they selected the plans of JM McBird MJ McBird of Logan's Port Indiana and McBird described his design as Franco Italianate pretty after they hired JD Silver and Sons also of Logan's Port to service contractors if there's a villain in the story of University Hall it is most likely Robert Silver the son who a few years later became the mayor of Lincoln twice construction commenced and the cornerstone was laid on September 23rd in 1869 so this gives us one more date to celebrate later this year we always need another party Silver built a brick works nearby to supply bricks and these bricks were part of the problem the bricks were not hard fired they were a little bit soft and lumber was hauled in in wagons from Nebraska City things did not progress smoothly Silver was not a hands-on supervisor and several men were killed and seriously injured and the scaffolding collapsed as they were building the upper levels of the building rumors of the foundation of foundation problems persisted from the beginning indeed the sandstone used for the foundation which was mined locally was too porous and soft by the time construction was nearing completion in the spring of 1871 the rumors regarding the basement could no longer be ignored the regents and others toured the building and deemed it sound but acknowledged that the basement needed some replacement of imperfect materials classes commenced in the fall 1871 there was Chancellor Benton four other faculty members 110 students who were not really in college but were attending the preparatory school and 20 university students so what went on inside the walls of this building everything faculty didn't have offices but there were recitation rooms laboratories the chancellor's office a library a music room rooms for the palladian and union literary societies and those were really very important to the social life of the community the campus students and faculty and there was also a very large portion of the building that was devoted to the chapel most private universities were affiliated with churches at this time and when the land grant act was passed citizens and administrators hadn't figured out how to separate public education and religion chapel was held daily and all students were required to attend and I'm sure faculty were as well the chapel and university hall was notoriously unpleasant it was cold it was drafty and it was damp and in fact the entire building was so damp because the original roof leaked causing chancellor Benton to note in 1872 that some difficulty has been experienced in making the roof impervious to rain that was an understatement where it was described as a miasma and this was most likely due to coal burning stoves that didn't really heat the building but kind of took the edge off I think if they got the building up to about 60 degrees they were probably thrilled boys were hired to constantly stoke the stoves and ashes were heaped next to the chapel neighborhood children would scale this giant mountain of ashes for a glimpse into the mysterious goings on inside the university the first floor recitation rooms were also especially foul since professor Frank Billings who was striving to cure hog cholera kept his hogs directly below in pens in the basement everyone agreed that an animal pathology facility was needed they never did build one instead they got in a fight with Frank Billings and he left the university in this photo the less ornamented portion of the building is the chapel and this photo was taken quite a few years after the university was founded in the 1890s but that's the notorious chapel and this is the corner where the giant ash heap was built problems with the university hall truly retarded the development of the institution in the very early years in 1877 the entire foundation had to be replaced due to continuing deterioration the entire roof was replaced in 1893 and often the city of Lincoln was expected to foot the bill for these repairs I think many legislators thought you got it you wanted it you fix it Lincoln that money spent on that was also spent on these repairs was money that was not spent on faculty salaries, laboratory equipment, library books and other needs political enemies of Lincoln and the university repeatedly cited problems with the building as justification to close the entire institution down and move it to their own cities usually Omaha or Nebraska City in 1889 agricultural interests attempted to move the land grant portion of the university and start a state university elsewhere Iowa State at this time was called the Iowa agricultural college and I think agriculture people within the state saw that and thought maybe we should just take that from the university and set up our own set up our own school in our town wherever they were from they wanted it there after the hiring of Charles Bessie in 1884 and the construction of a few new buildings on the campus in the late 80s the subject of removal finally started to die down this photo is an image from the Nebraska the Omaha Bee Omaha Daily Bee which was a newspaper in Omaha that was fairly hard on the university not 100% of the time but often this particular image is about a bill that a Senator Mullen from Omaha introduced to remove the university from Lincoln and move it to Omaha he was going to turn our campus over to the state asylum and and then have the legislature along with the city of Omaha purchase property up there and his rationale was Omaha's bigger we have more people we have we have the railroads we have we deserve it we deserve it more than Lincoln does luckily it was squelched the bill did not pass university hall had many problems but it didn't also have some improvements the building continued to evolve continued to have problems and in the late 1880s to everyone's great relief steam heat was introduced sewer lines were added in 1891 bringing the miracle of flush toilets to university hall by 1919 when the university celebrated its 50th anniversary the old bell tower the old the old bell in the tower was cracked and the exterior walls were wearing what Chancellor Avery called the corduroy effect created by a system of vertical metal posts and rods so the image we're looking at here is a plan that was drawn up for adding the sewer lines here is the old bell and this this is the bell that's over at the alumni association it's still cracked it doesn't have a clapper so it doesn't ring right anymore but that's where it was located on university hall right over the front door and then here is I hope you can see this this is an image that shows this system of rods and posts that were installed on the front and the back of the building the they looked like downspouts it's these these three metal pipes that run down the front of the building they held the building rigid this way and then these kind of star shaped metal plates anchored the rods that ran through the building from front to back so it's kind of shocking when you think about it that we let hundreds of students walk around in this building this kind of held together like tinker toys but anyway that that's that was what Chancellor Avery called the corduroy effect despite the terrible condition of university hall most former students were very attached to the old wreck Edna Bullock a librarian and alumna who grew up in the shadow of university hall had this to say at the 50th anniversary this is her quote old you hall in spite of your Franco Italian Hoosier architecture plus the corduroy effect in spite of all the disadvantages of primitive building which no amount of repairing and altering can entirely mitigate the alumni and students salute you every brick every stone every worn step and threshold the old cracked bell the red roof the useless old tower with the flag of our country flying against the incomparable blueness of Nebraska sky like what we have today all these are inseparable from our intellectual and spiritual inheritance the storied past speaks to us from your walls the lingering memories of youth's brightness cluster about you so clearly she was attached and from Louise Pound who worked in the building for many years in the same 50th anniversary publication Louise wrote about you hall it's recitation rooms and offices which house classes in history language literature and rhetoric look time-stained and battered in comparison with the new and attractive quarters of the natural sciences the technical sciences the social sciences and the vocational and agricultural schools but those who teach in the old building are glad to do so indeed they take pride in doing so they feel a deep love for it for university hall is the historic building among those on the campus and the classes reciting in it are those who were first desired by the founders of the institution she's kind of making a pitch here for the arts and sciences the college of arts and sciences and you know the university is changing and new new colleges are forming and there's a little more competition than there had been in the early days not many years later it was determined that the upper levels of university hall needed to be removed for safety's sake the upper stories including the tower were carefully demolished in 1925 the sad remnant of university hall remained in it's decapitated state and that language comes from the board of regents minutes I didn't make that up for another 20 plus years and it was finally demolished for good in 1948 in it's place we constructed Ferguson hall which was demolished in 2010 if you note right between the trees in this photo there's a lamp post and that lamp post stood in front of university hall and was really the first light on campus let's shift now to what was happening on the rest of campus during the late 19th century what did Charles Bessie see when he arrived on campus in 1884 standing on the threshold of university hall he probably saw a thriving little city south of campus since Lincoln was a boom town in the 1880s the population increased by more than 40,000 people during this decade he also saw a weedy looking expansive lawn and one difficult building but the following year in 1885 construction began on the first chemistry laboratory in Lincoln where Rachel Lloyd most likely the first American woman PhD in chemistry conducted research in sugar beads to help you visualize where these buildings were located I'll give you a little tour now this is an old fashion this is very low tech compared to what my friends at NET are doing right in the center we see a building marked UH that's university hall down in your right you see CL that's the chemistry lab buildings tended to develop up a long 12th street which is the street on the east side of the campus there during the next decade the university was able to construct several more new buildings including the first Nebraska hall this building was home to the industrial college and Charles Bessie served as its dean unlike university hall it had problems although they were not quite as severe it was home to the first agricultural experiment station following passage of the Hatch Act which Bessie co-authored it was home to museum collections which were beginning to grow pretty rapidly after the arrival of Irwin Barbour in 1891 the first director of the state museum who was here for like 50 years it was home to many science labs and recitation rooms where Bessie and his new faculty hires such as D.B. Brace and Lawrence Bruner taught core science courses there's just another image of Nebraska hall it's kind of a scary looking building most of you have probably heard of Ellen Smith often called Ma Smith both beloved and feared she was a campus fixture from the mid 1870s until her retirement in 1901 Ellen Smith was the first woman faculty member hired at the University of Nebraska she wore many hats over the years including principal of the latin school librarian and primarily she served as registrar George Howard recalled that Smith was loved by students even by those whom she rebuked for their shortcomings and she was respected by her colleagues even by those whom as registrar she frankly scolded for laxity in rendering their official reports in other words get your grades in of course now we have a high rise dormitory named in her honor I lived there and here's a picture of Charles Bessie in his office in Nebraska hall he spent almost his entire career in Nebraska hall except the first few years between the time he got here and the time this building was constructed I love this photo eventually Nebraska hall was demolished to make way for other things here we see Chancellor Hardin in 1962 with the cornerstone designed by Bessie with the inscription that Bessie wrote science with practice and I think that really sums up his career beautifully and this is what we built on the site of the old Nebraska hall which is a complex rendering from the mid 1960's Hamilton hall during the earliest years of the university a farm was established near the present innovation campus or the old state fairgrounds when the soil there proved very poor it was decided to purchase a farm east of the city near the current 33rd and Holdridge a small stone house and some outbuildings were there in 1875 but there were really almost no students at the farm the professor in charge of the farm worked and taught downtown and he had no employees so the farm didn't look very good the farm was a subject of a lot of criticism eventually a farm superintendent was hired and lived in the dormitory in 1899 Bessie used funds from the Hatch Act proceeds as part of the Hatch Act the university received $15,000 a year and that act was passed earlier in the 1890's and Bessie saved just a little money out of each of those annual allocations and he was able to use those proceeds to construct the first free standing agricultural experiment station which currently stands as the oldest building on the east campus there was a little dairy building that was built in the mid 1890's but it's been gone for many years Bessie took a strong interest in the farm and was instrumental in helping it to develop in 1910 he reflected on his early years at the university and his experiences regarding the farm accordingly I became a professor of botany and horticulture in the fall term of 1884 and this was my title for nearly eight years what these eight years accomplished cannot be told briefly in the first place at that time all teaching was done on the campus in the city no beginning having yet been made for school work on the farm then too the farm was a very long way out into the country at that time as the whole distance from the antelope valley to the farm was filled with corn fields wheat fields orchards and even wild and unbroken prairie land in muddy weather one had great difficulty in traversing the softer roads and it was a bad hours drive from the city to the old stone farm house and the rather shabby barns and sheds this really conjures up a journey eventually in 1889 SK Perrin was hired as president of the farm and whipped it into shape SK Perrin's real name was Senator K. Perrin and he never liked that name he went by will but in reality as time passed and he spent more and more years at the farm he was known to everybody as dad Perrin is of course the namesake of the Perrin porch located on the south the lawn south of the old experiment station building at the site of the old dormitory became his family's home for many decades Perrin and his wife Laura raised their four children at the farm and saw the farm evolve and saw students evolve as well he remained a farm campus fixture until his death in 1930 I want to quickly explain what was happening on the city campus in the last years of the 19th century several buildings were constructed that did not stand the test of time but were very important to the evolution of the campus almost simultaneously simultaneous with the construction of Old Nebraska Hall was the construction of Grant Memorial Hall located just north of the chemistry lab on 12th street Grant which was also called the Armory housed the military science program and served as a small gymnasium in 1900 a large addition was added to a new chapel that housed a pipe organ I think the old chapel became more library space plus it was so unpleasant so they added an organ was purchased by alumni I want to go to that photo this organ was purchased by alumni from the church was held in 1898 and alumni purchased it they took it apart they brought it to Lincoln and they installed it in Old Grant Hall actually a new addition to Grant Hall Grant Hall was designed by architects from Omaha Mendelssohn Fisher and Lawry and we'll see more of this firm in a few years Grant really provided the first gathering spot for the campus and in many ways it served as the first student union the temple also was kind of a union sort of a union but the temple wasn't built yet at this time no dances were allowed for surely dances led to sin but other events took place there such as the annual singing of the Messiah in its later years Grant was home to women's physical education a field in which Nebraska was always the leader and in fact we were the first in the country to have a degree in women's physical education it was condemned by the State Fire Marshal and demolished in 1966 I think it suffered from some neglect in 1891 Lieutenant John J. Pershing arrived to serve as head of the military science program his office was located in Grant Hall where he managed to make military science popular with students who were required to take it as part of our land grant mission and if you look closely here this is the doorway of Grant Hall I know what the doorway of Grant Hall looks like but that's where this is taken Pershing retained ties to Lincoln for many years since his sister May continued to live here after Pershing moved on and in fact she raised Pershing's son Warren here for his wife and all three of his daughters died in a terrible fire at the Presidio in San Francisco while he was stationed at Fort Bliss in Texas his sister May's home stood at 1748 B that home has been raised Pershing and Chancellor James Canfield were at the University during the same years when Canfield arrived in Lincoln to visit campus prior to accepting the position it was kind of a sorry sight I'll just say it but the regions were already in the process of beautifying the grounds and we're building a decorative iron fence that surrounded the original campus for many years in 1892 the grounds were landscaped with ornamental plantings and real sidewalks prior to this time the sidewalks were gravel they were mud they were wooden boards but they put down real pavers around also around this time the campus was electrified as were most of its buildings gone with the gas lights that were never quite adequate apparently everywhere but in the library in University Hall so students complained about this bitterly that there was decent light everywhere but in the library where they most wanted it but shortly after Canfield's arrival funding was made available to start work on the new library Canfield was painfully aware that most buildings on campus were troubled in fact when he arrived in June of 1891 he was asked to give the commencement address his audience quickly learned of his exceptional oratory skills since he had to make himself heard over the racket of a steam pump which was draining the basement of University Hall following a rainstorm the previous evening Canfield decided that no more bad buildings would be constructed on his watch when library construction started in 1892 Canfield insisted on hiring a foreman whose name was George Smith and apparently this was not done for public buildings there was nobody advocating for the public so the contractor was always working for himself which explains why all of the early buildings had these issues. The University Hall wasn't the only problem building constructed in the 1870s the capital was completely replaced probably when it was 10 years old so he hired George Smith to advocate for the university. High quality materials were expected and Smith and Canfield both rejected deliveries of poor brick and stone the amount that was funded by the 1891 legislature proved to be inadequate so the regents in Canfield decided to just build as much as possible and then ask for more money during the next legislative session. Now that is bold and audacious but it backfired when the legislature reconvened in 1893 Canfield went to the capital and asked for more money but the state's economy was in serious trouble. Drought, grasshoppers and loss of population plagued the state and no money was appropriated for the unfinished library the university made no attempt to disguise the job site and they let weeds grow up around the project which led the Nebraska State Journal to call the library that melancholy ruin that was Charles Geer. Charles Geer really was our first real advocate he was on the committee that chartered the university and he used and he was on the board of regents he was president for many years he hired Canfield but he also used the Nebraska State Journal to kind of counter some of the negativity that was coming out of the Omaha newspapers the library's forlorn appearance was made more glaring by contrast to the newly improved grounds finally the 1895 legislature made another appropriation so that the library could be completed designed by Mendelssohn Fisher and Laubrie, architects of Grant Hall it was considered one of the finest libraries facilities in the country when it finally opened for business later that year the library was shared by both the art department and art gallery on the upper floor and the state historical society on the ground floor it was decades before the library regained these spaces for library work pictured here is Kerry Bell Raymond with the University Chorus in 1922 so 30 years later and the space was still not devoted to library purposes this distinctive room is now the architecture library reading room and matter of fact my office is right about where that piano is and here is a decent picture of the iron fence and many people in Lincoln know the story of the iron fence it surrounded the campus from 1892 until 1922 but by 1922 the campus had grown and the original campus was smaller than the newly purchased property to the east people were very divided about the fence alumni loved the fence it was a symbol of when they went to school and were sent mental and attached to it but students felt like the fence was constraining the university and that it sent the wrong message so the fence was removed in 1922 and erected on O Street along Waikika Cemetery so every time you drive down O Street you're driving by our old fence I don't profess to know everything about the university's history but I do know where the bodies are buried for almost 40 years this stone marks the ashes of Professor James T. Lees and is located on the east side of the old library Professor Lees who was Professor of Greek wanted his ashes scattered on campus and he wanted his marker to be on the campus when the university was academically reorganized in 1914 Professor Lees served as the university's first provost. After the turn of the century the quality of buildings improved considerably. Brace, Richards and the original administration building were all constructed in the first decade of the century along with the original museum which was the precursor to Morrill Hall after years of pleading D.B. Brace was finally getting a new building also designed by Mendelssohn Fisher and Laury but very different from the Victorian Library or Grant Hall. Brace laboratories were designed with a large rectangular renaissance revival plan designed to house the physics program. A site was selected north of the library and directly west of University Hall. Shortly after the site was announced the athletic committee chaired by C.R. Richards petitioned the regents to reconsider the building site since it interfered with the original football field. A compromise plan involved simply removing the northeast corner of the new building's footprint so that the field could remain intact. It's really not a compromise. The football team pictured here in late 2004 did not find the compromise very suitable since the building was very close to the south end zone. Brace is still under construction in this photo. And just to orient you this set of bleachers, the grandstand, backed up to 10th street it would be just up the street here. And the field was in that northwest corner of campus. Ironically the football field was relocated in 1908 so that C.R. Richards, chair of the athletic committee, could get his own new building on the site of the original field. The mechanical engineering laboratories now known as Richards Hall is named in his honor. This is an aerial view of campus taken in the 1920's and it shows us how compact and densely built the original campus had become by the turn of the century. The northwest corner of campus on the left in this photo was home to the old football field and you can see Richards Hall and Brace Hall there in that corner. We can also see the old smokestacks from the original power plant and a few other not too impressive buildings. We see University Hall in the center of the photo with his top stories lopped off and you'll notice above it and a little to your right, Nebraska Hall suffered the same decapitation. Along our street which is at the bottom of this photo running to the right of the corner of 10th and R we see the original law school. The first of many Ellery Davis designs to cover the campus. Next to it is the library and across the lawn from the library we also can see the original administration building designed by Thomas Kimball in 1906. For those of you who may not know, Thomas Kimball will be installed in the Nebraska Hall of Fame in the state capital next month. Kimball is Nebraska's most respected historic architect and the designer of several important Nebraska buildings as well as the master planner for the Trans Mississippi Exposition in Omaha. He was instrumental in designing the competition for the state capital building and he was involved in that project as the capital was constructed. And here's the little administration building that sat on our street approximately where the sculpture gardens are now. He introduces yet another style to campus so at this point we've got our Victorian eclectic, we've got Renaissance revival, we've got Franco Italianate Hoosier. And in just a few years after this we'll have the sort of Romanesque Richard's Hall. Sadly the administration building was demolished in 1963 for the construction of the Sheldon sculpture gardens. It was really a kind of a victim of its own site. I think if it had been in a different part of campus maybe that building could have been saved but it sort of blocked entrance to the campus and blocked the view of the sculpture gardens which were intended from the pretty much from the beginning. Okay, we have been looking at pretty low tech views of campus using black and white photos but now my colleague Steve Colby from the Johnny Carson School will show us a different kind of view. Steve is using augmented reality and Google Earth. And this is really remarkable but he's going to fly over campus and we can look at some of these sites as they appear today. He's going to fly us by the Capitol. Just like at the football games. There we go. This little red spot we see here is the park that's been created on the side of the original University Hall. And moving, let's see move a little south of there Steve. And here, here's the corner of the sculpture garden where the administration building sat. It was kind of a cross from the library. Let's head over to Sheldon. Steve and I are quite a team. Okay, Sheldon is built almost exactly on the site of the chemistry laboratory although it's significantly larger. North of Sheldon to the parking lot, this parking lot here, that would have been the location of Grant Hall. It would have extended to the west into that area where Grant Hall is now. And also in that parking area along 12th Street there would have been the original museum. Just a little stub of that museum was built and it was also designed by Thomas Kimmel. But it was really not a real building. It was just a piece of a building. And then of course Hamilton Hall. You can't miss that. Our largest building I think and it's built on the site of the first Nebraska Hall. Let's cruise over to Richard's and Brace. Yeah. There's Richard's Hall. That was the football field coming this way and there's Brace Hall. Go back north just a tad, Steve. There. See what's missing from Brace Hall? It's not a rectangle. It's kind of an L shape because of the football field. That's what DB Brace gave up in the name of football. Okay, coming south a little bit and here we have the Old Library and the Old Law School which now together form Architecture Hall. So if we cruise down R Street to the east there's Love Library and the former CBA now Louise Pound Hall. I want to thank whoever had that great idea. I think it's a great idea. And Steve can you like go over kind of yeah. I want everybody to make a mental note of the sidewalk that runs under this building. This is the library addition. And then north of the library up ahead past Ralph Mueller's tower we have Memorial Mall and I'm going to talk about these things in just a minute. Thank you Steve. You're the master. And he's doing this with a broken hand. So as you can see from these photos this is full. Every inch is built up and we're out of room to grow our little university into something bigger. So what followed this is the Old Law School by the way. What followed was one of the most interesting and impactful decisions ever made not necessarily by the university kind of in conjunction with the university. In 1912 the state legislature passed a new law allowing for initiatives and referenda. This meant that issues could be placed directly on the ballot for a vote of the people. So what does this have to do with the University of Nebraska? It's very complicated. Many years before Charles Bessie and others had begun to consider their options for growing the university and Bessie suggested moving the entire enterprise to the farm where there was ample room for growth. Not many people listened. But by 1910 the campus was full and the farm was not. Chancellor Avery eventually supported the idea and became enthusiastic. The regents eventually came around but it was a politically charged idea. Merchants in downtown Lincoln feared loss of revenue since barber shops, clothing stores, boarding houses, movie theaters, lunch rooms and a host of other businesses all benefited from the cash that flowed down 11th street. In this era the regents could not make this decision without the support of the legislature and I think even today that would be a tough thing to navigate. To abandon new buildings on the city campus and then ask the citizens of Nebraska to rebuild all new buildings at the farm seemed like an extravagance. But the consolidation would have allowed the university to develop a planned campus with well constructed and architecturally sympathetic buildings and nearly unlimited space for growth. The 1911 senate, we were still a house and a senate. We weren't a camera yet. The 1911 senate voted enthusiastically to support the removal so the house voted against it. The issue remained unsolved. Chancellor Avery hired while this was going on he had hired a highly respected Boston architectural firm Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge to become the official architects of the university hoping to build this distinctive and cohesive campus that Avery really wanted. The architects developed plans for a consolidated farm campus but there was such continued discord over the removal question that Avery also had them develop plans for an expanded city campus. That's the expanded farm campus. You can see the stadium and everything is out there, the football field. They also built, designed an expanded city campus and that's 12th street running right through the center of it so they're doubling, more than doubling the size of the, more than doubling the size of the campus. The highly partisan 1913 legislature debated the question again. Finally it was decided that the state should utilize the new initiative in referendum law. The issue was placed on the ballot and a statewide vote of the people would occur in 1914. In the meantime, merchants in downtown Lincoln outspent the university and hired a publicity firm. They peppered the state with anti-consolidation propaganda while the regents made these polite speeches and pleas to civic groups and newspaper interviews and things. Opponents focused on waste and cost knowing that these were issues that would inflame Nebraska voters. University supporters focused on growth and improved facilities. The upside was that as the issue was being debated, the legislature recognized that the university had reached a desperate situation in regard to its buildings. They passed a bill that provided for six years of enhanced funding regardless of which location scenario was approved for building improvements and or land acquisition. I think you all have guessed by now how this story ended since we're here on city campus. The consolidation proposal was defeated by a margin of more than three to one thanks to aggressive publicity the aggressive publicity campaign waged by downtown merchants. But with the increase in funding provided by the legislature, Avery and his architects set out to design an expanded city campus. They purchased the property immediately east of the old campus and the rest is history. Here's a map of our current campus and this is the section that they bought in 1914 after the referendum. So what did these architects design? I'll go through these quickly because I know I'm rambling. They designed Bessie Hall, which Bessie unfortunately never worked in. They started working on the building just a few months after his death. These buildings, a lot of these buildings share common features like diagonal staircases. We see that in these Pound Hall, the old CBA, the old social sciences building. We see that in Bessie Hall. They designed a new chemistry laboratory, which we now call Avery Hall, although in these years it was known as the chemistry laboratory and was not named for Avery for another 20 years. They designed the first teacher's college building and if this building looks odd to you, partly it's because they set it out in this field with nothing around it, clear over on 14th Street, which was the far edge of the new property. We see this interesting window and that doesn't look very familiar to us because we built this in 1957. This is our current Canfield administration building that attaches to the old teacher's college at the site of that window. This explains the crazy stairwell in that building. Which is, you know, which is a challenging staircase. They also designed Louise Pound Hall, which at that time was called the Social Sciences Building. On East Campus they designed Philly Hall, home to the UNL Dairy Store, where one of our events is later this week, and they designed Chase Hall at the head of the mall and I think Chase really kind of finishes that mall in a beautiful way. Eventually the official architects parted ways with the university, mainly because we built a stadium and we used local architects thereby breaking the terms of the contract. The promise of a unified campus was never realized, but growth continued on the new property and other properties were added as years passed. Ellery Davis of Davis and Wilson, which is now Davis Design, a local firm, became the go-to architect for campus. Davis and his firm went on to design over a dozen campus buildings beginning in the 1920s and including the stadium, the Coliseum, Morrill Hall, the Student Union, and Love Library. I'm almost done. In 1926, a new campus plan was developed by George Seymour, who was a regent. Seymour developed this interest in campus planning and he went all over campus meeting with different groups and talking to folks about what campus should look like and he came up with this plan. The plan identified both Memorial Mall and the Quadrangle. Now Memorial Mall, we see they're coming out of the stadium and we still know that mall, it's very much intact today. The Quadrangle, not so much. The Quadrangle is now the sidewalk that runs under the Love Library North edition. His plan also created a historic Greek row with sororities on the east side of 16th Street and fraternities on the west and there was absolutely no question about them being next door to each other. They bought out the Sigma Chi house, which was on the east side, and moved it, gave them the lot on Vine Street because they did not want the frats and the sororities right next door to each other. The modern core of our campus that we know today was clearly established by 1925. In the 1950s and 60s, rapid growth and enrollment brought seven high-rise dorms, two high-rise classroom buildings, and the next Nebraska Hall. It also brought Selick Quadrangle, which kind of messed up the east end of the Quadrangle as well. Worn out buildings on the old campus gradually disappeared and today only four buildings remain to serve as evidence of the early university. Thank you for listening. I'll moderate the discussion, but if I may take a minute, I just want to thank everybody for this amazing presentation on the history of our institution. And I have just very brief remarks to make that are inspired by this presentation. So digital technologies, especially 3D modeling that was the core of the presentation, are influencing our teaching, our research, and our public presentations. And there is growing interest among our students and many faculty to use these new tools to gain a better understanding of our heritage, including the history of our institution as well as our state. So I wanted to say that this is the beginning. There are additional ongoing projects taking place in the classroom. They're based on classroom work, collaboration, and student participation. And this involved an augmented reality tour of our campus, which is in development, as well as digital exhibits of everyday life in early Lincoln. And these are based on artifacts recovered from excavations on our campus, something that very few people have heard that has happened. So I wanted to say that there is more to come in the near future. And these will highlight the early formative period of our university as well as the city and our state. So we're ready for questions, both for our speaker or for our high tech team. We know Architecture Hall is two of them. What are the other two of the four? The other two would be Brace Laboratory and Richards Hall and the former law school and the former library. So they're really all there in a little rectangle, aren't they? They're on the 20th century side of the original campus. The 19th century side is gone. I know you said they saved the bell from University Hall. Did they save any pieces of other buildings that are around campus? Well, there's a piece of temple in my office that I found on the sidewalk one day. Temple was still standing. When University Hall was taken down, I think there were many pieces collected. And I think the Alumni Association might have some of those. Is that correct, Diane? Do you know? Or anybody else here from the Alumni Association? I do think there were pieces collected. The contents of that first cornerstone were of course ruined by the leaky roof. So a second cornerstone was laid when the second foundation was put in. And those contents are I believe in university archives. But in terms of building pieces there are some scattered around. The gates over at the columns are still around. I have a question. So in early years, just a single building it's the University Hall, right? Right. So I want to know where the students, early students, leave. Oh, that's a really good question. The university didn't really have any dormitories until 1930s something and that was a women's dorm. Students lived in boarding houses which were scattered around what we now call downtown Lincoln but was really most of Lincoln in those days. So many of them lived in boarding houses but the lack of housing on campus really led to the Greek system. The sort of popularity of Greek houses was partly because of the housing that the Greek houses provided. And the Greek houses were not along Greek row. They were also kind of scattered around downtown. I think students lived any place they could find a room. So in response to the question about building artifacts, I'm in the chemistry department and we have two medallions that were on the chemical laboratory when it was torn down in the 1960s. Outside the front doors? Outside the two front doors. As of Gamelin chemist and the other is Shaila chemist. I'm not really sure why. Do you have them on display in Hamilton? They are in the chair's office. Very good. And the University of Florence is the only other place with medallions like these. Oh, interesting. We'll see. I learned something new. You mentioned that at several points we had these examples of drastically different architectural styles being built one right after the other. Did you find research any evidence that there was ever an effort to unify the look of the campus or did we just keep whatever the latest thing is? I think in those early years it was kind of like that. It was whatever the architect proposed. But I think that was something that really bothered Avery. Avery wanted, I think he traveled and he saw other institutions and he saw how much more cohesive their campuses were because they had used one architect. That was why he went ahead and hired Shepley, Rutan and Koolidge as the official architects. And that was really their purpose was to sort of set a style and they selected similar building materials. One thing about those buildings they did, they're all a certain type of red brick and they all have Bedford Limestone trim. And if we had used them from the very beginning and continued to use them until now, we'd have a really unified campus. But they have disbanded many years ago but that was kind of the goal with that. And because the referendum was defeated, that opportunity was never there. Kate, does your research look into the original Ellen Smith Hall which was the house by the administration? I skipped that part of the story. When the university expanded to the east and bought that big piece of property between 12th and 14th, there was a beautiful house that was a private home but it was now part of the property. And so that house became the women's building and it was renamed for Ellen Smith and that was at the request of women alumni. The interior of that house was very elaborate and very beautiful. And it was, I think, dismantled much to the chagrin of many people. But I know that parts of that interior were carted off. I don't know if it was auctioned off but not much of it was saved in any kind of university way. This is more a comment but my understanding is that a film was made of one of Best Streeter Aldrich's books and because the book involved a teacher at the university they filmed part of it on the campus and showed the lower part of University Hall. I've seen that movie and they're very careful not to rise above to show the decapitation but if you want, and I'm sorry I don't remember the name of the movie. I can't remember it either and I know the film that you mean. First Remus Bishop. Okay, yes, so if you want to see live action people descending the steps of University Hall you can watch that movie. It's a very small part of the movie I have to say. That of course is the first movie filmed on campus, the other one being Terms of Endearment that was filmed in the Dean's Office in Architecture Hall. Questions or comments? You're all invited to stay and try this wonderful technology that Chad and his team have put together. And putting on the headsets. The headsets, really fun.