Category: M.A.C. Buildings

These solid, picturesque brick structures were constructed to house many departments of the Michigan Agricultural College, including: Over the years, as the departments grew, most of these buildings became too small to house them and larger replacements were constructed elsewhere on campus. Beginning in the 1920s the laboratory row was repeatedly threatened with demolition, and…

The College’s first Astronomical Observatory was a useful addition to the campus when it was completed in 1880, but until very recently had long been a forgotten part of M.A.C. history. The modest building with its equatorially mounted telescope gets a brief mention by Kuhn, but only Beal gives it more than a single sentence:…

The first Boiler House at the Michigan Agricultural College was begun in 1882 and completed in 1884. Designed by R. C. Carpenter, it had a square chimney, 60 feet tall, and provided steam heat for Wells Hall, Williams Hall, the Chemical Laboratory, and the Library–Museum. A power plant was completed in 1894, and allowed the campus’ first electric lights. In…

Football became a varsity sport at M.A.C. in 1896, and initially played its home games on the parade ground now known as Adams Field. From 1902 to 1922 the team played on Old College Field, sharing that site with the baseball team and other outdoor athletics. In 1923 the core of what is now Spartan Stadium…

The Union Memorial Building is an important social center for the university community. The building as it stands today is the end product of several decades of hard work and slow progress. The first calls for a student union came around the turn of the twentieth century, but despite a great deal of alumni interest,…

Accurate weather forecasts are an important part of scientific agriculture, but meteorology is an exceedingly vague science without steady observational data. For this reason records were kept at the Michigan Agricultural College beginning in its very earliest years. At least as early as November 1858, John C. Holmes tracked atmospheric pressure, winds, clouds, and precipitation three times…

All three editions of Wells Hall were named for Judge Hezekiah Griffith Wells (1812–1885). H. G. Wells (not the famed author) was born in Ohio and studied at Kenyon College. In 1833 he came to Kalamazoo, where he served as county judge and was elected to five terms as village president. He was appointed one of…

With the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862, friends of the University at Ann Arbor began to covet the potentially lucrative grant of lands to the Agricultural College. That year a joint legislative committee recommended that the grant, and the agricultural school, be transferred to the University. The proposal drew substantial support from around…