Agriculture Laboratory — Cook–Seevers Hall (1889) SR

Former Agriculture Lab, circa 1934, when it housed Entomology. Photo Credit: M.S.U. Physical Plant.

This modest building was designed by Professor Samuel Johnson and constructed under the supervision of Professor Rolla Carpenter as the first agricultural laboratory at M.A.C. Considering that the College’s main focus was agriculture, the laboratory was probably undersized even when it opened. Its lack of space was compounded by a well-intentioned Board of Agriculture that had, in the 1890s, “come to supervise the College with a meticulous hand. They had a suite of rooms on the second floor of the agricultural laboratory where they lived during the two and three day monthly meetings.”[28th AR (1889), p. 33. 29th AR (1890), p. 54. Kuhn, p. 194]

Twenty years later, when the new Agriculture Hall was completed, the Department of Entomology moved in. It remained here until the Natural Science Building was completed in 1948.

Dr. A. J. Cook. Photo Credit: Beal, p. 412.

In 1969 the building was renamed after Dr. Albert John Cook (1842–1916, M.A.C. ’62, M.S. ’65), Professor of Zoology and Entomology (1868–1893). He also served as the first curator of the museum (1875–1893). Professor Cook’s office, laboratories, and classroom were on the second floor of the Library–Museum, where he began a Collection of Insects in 1867. Within eleven years it contained some 1,200 locally collected specimens. Some time in the 1930s the collection was moved to a brick annex at the rear of the Entomology Building. Today, the Albert J. Cook Arthropod Research Collection is housed on the fourth floor of the Natural Science Building, and consists of well over two million specimens from around the world.[Minutes, 16 May 1969, p. 6448]

After his departure from M.A.C., Cook served eighteen years on the faculty of Pomona College (California) as Professor of Biology. During the last five years of his life he served as state commissioner of horticulture for California. He and his first wife, Mary H. Baldwin (1848–1896) raised four children at Faculty Row № 3 who all became M.A.C. graduates. Among them, a son Albert B. Cook (M.A.C. ’93) served a four-year term as state senator, and their daughter Katherine Cook Briggs (M.A.C. ’93) was co-creator, along with her daughter, of the Myers–Briggs personality assessment test. Katherine was married in 1896 to her former classmate, Lyman J. Briggs (M.A.C. ’93, chair of FDR’s Advisory Committee on Uranium, among other claims to fame).

As part of the Laboratory Row, Cook Hall is listed on the state historic register. It was renovated in 1998 to house offices for the Department of Agriculture Economics and other units of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Further renovations in 2018 were made possible by a $3 million donation from agricultural economist Gary L. Seevers (M.S.U. B.A. ’59, M.A. ’66, Ph.D. ’68), who sweated over his dissertation in its basement. The building is now known as Cook–Seevers Hall.[CANR News, 23 Oct 2018]