Illustrated History - The Campus

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Old Sem before 1888, when the double-ramped stairs were removed

From the devastation caused by a fire on February 16, 1924

The Iowa Conference Seminary opened as Cornell College on August 27, 1857. It had 294 students, seven faculty, and one building. The Seminary Building, eventually known as Old Sem, contained the chapel, music and recitation rooms, a kitchen and dining room, and housed women students on the second floor and faculty members on the third floor.

As enrollment increased a second building, the Main College Building (later known as Main and then College Hall) was built in 1857, and Old Sem was converted to a ladies' boarding hall. During the winter residents paid a fee to have firewood cut and carried into the building. For more than 30 years Cornell's women continued to board and room in the building despite lack of modern conveniences. To those young women who moved out of "the old Sem" and into Bowman Hall in 1885, this new dormitory must have seemed like one of the wonders of the world. Here were four stories capable of housing 100 women in comfortable double rooms illuminated by gas lights. Each floor had a bathroom and hot and cold running water. The dining room, where male students who roomed in town might take their meals, could seat 200 persons.

Cadets lined up in front of an airplane that never flew.

Bowman Hall has housed women except during World War II, when the Naval Flight Preparatory School landed on campus and took over the building for nearly two years.

Old Sem was refitted for chemistry and physics in 1886 and was further remodeled in 1892. Following a 1924 fire that left only the masonry walls standing, Old Sem was rebuilt in its original style. It now houses administrative offices.

An experiment was tried to provide men with campus housing when the Cornell Boarding Association Hall, now South Hall, was built in 1873. At first popular, the dormitory style of life soon proved less appealing than that of the rooming houses which clustered around the campus, and the new building was gradually converted to academic use. It was not until 1929 that men were again housed on campus, with first-year men living in Guild Hall, a former hotel purchased by the college. In 1936 Merner Hall provided a residence for upperclass men as well. Now 95 percent of Cornell students live either in one of nine residence halls or in college-owned apartments.

Bowman Hall as it originally looked. Note the wooden porch and the bay windows of the conservatory of flowers (both removed in 1934).

Since 1904 the library has served Mount Vernon as well as the college, one of only three such partnerships in the world. Cornell's first library was opened in 1854 on the third floor of what is now Old Sem in a room 10 by 16 feet, which, Dr. Stephen N. Fellows wrote, "was my bedroom, sitting room and parlor, and not being sufficiently utilized, became the library room." Between 1857 and 1905, the library was located in various campus buildings. Thanks to the generosity of Andrew Carnegie, the college in 1905 dedicated its first building designed for the exclusive use of the library. Originally called the Carnegie Library, it is now the Norton Geology Center and Anderson Science Museum. The increasing size of the collection led in 1957 to the construction of the present Cole Library. Named for the college's ninth president, Cole Library combined the functions of a library and a social center until 1966, when The Commons was built. A major library renovation in 1994-95 coincided with installation of automated circulation, catalogue, and acquisitions systems.

Cole Library today. The lighthouse-like main entrance was added in 1995.

The campus, consisting in 1995 of 129 acres and 41 buildings, covers a long wooded hilltop. It was included in its entirety on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, the first (and at this time the only) college or university campus to be so honored.

Cole Library before its renovation in 1995.

The limestone blocks appear to change color depending upon the position and brightness of the sun

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