William Neal Reynolds Coliseum
description: William Neal Reynolds, Jr. Coliseum is located next to Talley Student Union on Central Campus. According to the dedication program for Reynolds Coliseum, the idea for the building came from David Clark, an alumnus of NC State, during the 1940 Farmer’s Week Meetings. They were scheduled to be held at the outdoor Riddick Stadium, but were rained out for two days. Clark was struck by the idea that NC State needed a coliseum to hold indoor events. According to a Technician article from 1974, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Coliseum’s opening, construction originally began in 1942, but was halted in 1943, due to World War II. Construction began again in 1948. The first event held at the Coliseum was a 1949 basketball game between NC State and Washington and Lee University. Reynolds Coliseum was also outfitted with special pipes which allowed them to turn it into an ice rink. It was at the April 22, 1950 intermission of “Ice Cycles of 1950” that the building was officially dedicated. The Coliseum was named after William Neal Reynolds, Jr., former chairman of the Board of directors of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Reynolds was an alumni of Duke, but many sources list him as being a generous benefactor of NC State through the years. An April 1950 News & Observer article quotes Chancellor Harrelson as saying the Coliseum was named for Reynolds as “an act in appreciation of the industrial and humanitarian leadership of Mr. Reynolds.” It was Reynold’s niece, Mary Katherine Reynolds Babcock, who suggested naming the building after her uncle, and who made the original financial contributions for erecting the coliseum, as well as additional funds later in order to construct the ice rink. Reynolds Coliseum held many events through the years including basketball games, ice shows, and musical concerts. Famous musical acts such as the Rolling Stones and Elton John have played the venue. Reynolds hosted speakers like campaigning, sitting, and former presidents, John F. Kenned…
creator: Emma Stout
date: 2021/05/23

Alexander Hall
description: Alexander Hall is located on North Campus just south of Wolf Plaza and is home to the living learning community Global Village. The residence hall opened in 1939, and was originally called “A” Dormitory. In 1940, Alexander Hall was renamed after Sydenham Bernard Alexander, Jr, an alumni and member of the Board of Trustees. According to Alice Reagan’s North Carolina State University: A Narrative History, during World War II, Alexander Hall was used by the Army Air Corps, along with nearby Turlington Hall. Between the two dorms there was a barrack area, a sentry post, a canteen, and a recreation room provided by the YMCA. After the war, Alexander Hall housed male students, however, in September 1967, Alexander Hall became a women’s dormitory, making it the second women’s dormitory at NC State after Watauga. An article in the Statelog from December 1966 stated this was due to an expected increase in women students, and the fact that Carroll Hall, which was being built to house women, would not be completed by the fall of ‘67. Women living in Alexander would have had to follow special curfews which only applied to women students. According to Regan’s A Narrative History, the restrictions gradually lessened in 1968 when junior and senior women were exempt from the curfew and were finally dropped altogether in 1971. Alexander Hall became a men’s dormitory again and in the fall of 1975 the Alexander International Hall program opened. This program was meant to facilitate cross-cultural understanding between domestic and international students and was organized so that each international student would room with a domestic student. The dormitory also held events such as international coffees and hosted trips to Washington D.C. for the international students. Alexander Hall was chosen due to its central location and the large basement which could serve as the International Lounge. In 1977, the International Program expanded to include women and Alexander Hall became a co-ed do…
creator: Emma Stout
date: 2021/05/14

Lee Residence Hall
description: By June of 1964, a new building graced North Carolina State University’s skyline: the nine-story “Dorm ’62,” which the school renamed “Lee Hall” a year later. The building, located on Central Campus west of Bragaw Hall, was the first high-rise dormitory at State. In 1970 it became another first: the first all-men’s dorm to open some floors to women. When Chancellor John Caldwell announced construction of Lee Hall in 1961, the campus was “‘700 to 1,000 beds shy’ of meeting its present housing needs,” as an official told the News and Observer (N&O). At eighty-five feet high, Lee could house 840 students, according to a 1965 Statelog. That year, NC State’s Committee on Institutional History and Naming of Buildings proposed dedicating “Dorm ‘62” to Major General William Carey Lee (1895-1948), an alumnus and former instructor in Military Science (according to Alumni Affairs Director H.W. Taylor). Lee gained fame “organizing and establishing the Airborne Command,” according to his 1944 Distinguished Service Medal Citation. He trained the parachuting 101st Airborne Division to invade Normandy on D-Day in 1944, using what the citation called “exceptional ability, force of character, and the will to get the job done.” In 1945, the same year Lee received an NC State honorary degree, fifty-eight “coeds” (the twentieth-century term for women attending coeducational institutions, as researcher Lynn Peril explained) enrolled in the school. There were 200 women students by 1962, (2.86% of the student population, according to a Historical State timeline). But women alumnae recalled in oral histories that they felt, as Linda Jewell said, like an “odd duck.” “There were certainly assumptions that you were not going to make it,” she explained, and that “if you did that you were somehow not feminine.” Sally Schauman reported her School of Design dean, Henry Kamphoefner, “didn’t believe that design students should be two kinds. They shouldn’t be men who joined fraternities or women peri…
creator: Alanna Natanson
date: 2021/05/14

Greek Village
description: Greek Village is located on South Campus, between North Campus and Centennial Campus. It is approximately 50 acres of land owned by the University for use by Greek Life organizations on campus. Construction on Greek Village began in 2011, a massive rebuilding project of what was formerly Greek Court. The development of Greek Village is divided into five phases and each phase includes a certain number of houses being demolished and rebuilt. According to NC State’s Fraternity and Sorority webpage, as of 2021, there are 19 of a total 21 planned sorority and fraternity houses built. The land is owned by the University and leased to the organizations, while all new houses which are built are owned by the Greek organizations themselves. The University continues to own and operate several houses in Greek Village. The project was first discussed in 2005, by a small ad hoc group of Greek Life staff and alumni, as indicated by the 2005-2006 Department of Greek Life Report. In March 2006, Chancellor James L. Oblinger appointed sixteen members to an official task force to redevelop Greek court. To these sixteen appointees Oblinger explained the commitment of the University to the project in a March 16, 2006 letter, writing, “Greek letter organizations have been an integral part of student life at NC State University for more than 100 years... The University is committed to our fraternities and sororities, and wants to continue to provide strong support to those groups.” The group was tasked with investigating a land-lease system which would allow chapters to build their own houses on university property as well as urging them to “utilize the principles from the University Physical Master Plan.” The “Final Report & Recommendations” made by the Greek Court Redevelopment Task Force stated that one of the reasons the school was supporting the redevelopment of Greek Court into Greek Village includes that “Alumni/ae of these organizations are active supporters of the University provi…
creator: Emma Stout
date: 2021/05/14

Infirmary/Winslow Hall
description: North Carolina State University named Winslow Hall, along Pullen Road on the university’s North Campus, for Arthur Winslow, a surveyor who lobbied North Carolina’s General Assembly to establish the school in 1887. But the Hall was also the site of two notable women in the university’s history. Susan Carroll (1849-1901), the college’s first matron, and Ellen “Ella” McGuire (1861-1946), a nurse, cook, and laundry worker, called the 1897 building their workplace. Both showed strength and resourcefulness in response to the school’s poor employment practices, but students who memorialized the women used gender and racial stereotypes that downplayed their fortitude. During Carroll’s and McGuire’s times, the building was the school’s infirmary (although McGuire started working there after Carroll’s death). Everything from smallpox inoculations to appendix operations occurred within its walls until 1943, according to President’s Reports. The Bureau of Mines inhabited it 1943-1956, and the Alumni Association headquartered there 1956-2006. Since 2021, Winslow Hall has held administrative offices. The Board of Trustees elected Susan Carroll college matron in 1889, before there was even an infirmary. Her duties, they wrote in meeting minutes, involved “care of the dining and bed rooms, linen.” Carroll was used to overseeing household tasks; “keeping house” was her occupation on both the 1870 Federal Census when she lived with her parents in Turkey Creek, NC and on the 1880 Federal Census as a married thirty-year-old in Magnolia, NC. It is unlikely, however, that she labored physically: her father owned nine human beings according to an 1860 US Slave Schedule, and her husband employed a thirteen-year-old Black servant in 1880. Carroll was not used to overseeing infirmaries, as Chancellor John Caldwell later noted in a tribute, but the Board of Trustees granted her charge of the new hospital anyway in 1899. She succeeded, for alumni honored her with a plaque, according to a 1902 …
creator: Alanna Natanson
date: 2021/05/14

Harrelson Hall
description: “On first sight, Harrelson Hall looks as if it was designed to be dunked in the Union coffee or to be used as a giant tractor tire,” wrote Technician reporter Max Hurlocker in 1967. When Harrelson Hall was built in 1961, it was the first cylindrical building on a college campus. Once a prominent feature of the brickyard, directly across from D.H. Hill library between Polk and Williams Hall, Harrelson Hall was demolished in 2016 and replaced by grassy landscaping. Harrelson Hall is named after John W. Harrelson, former Chancellor of the University and the first alumnus to serve in the position. Harrelson served from 1934-1953, and upon his death in 1955, Harrelson left the school an endowment of more than $100,000. When Harrelson was first appointed his title was “Dean of Administration.” It was changed to Chancellor in 1945. According to Alice Regan, in “North Carolina State University: A Narrative History,” Harrelson’s early leadership was seen by students as paternalistic and students compared school rules such as strict attendance policies to those of high schools or the military. This tension was mitigated after 1939 with the appointment of a faculty-student committee. Harrelson also proved he was willing to stick up for students’ freedom of expression in the months before the United States entered World War II. Despite anger aimed towards students proposing “America First” policies, Harrelson defended students' right to freedom of expression within the student newspaper, the Technician. During Harrelson’s tenure the School of Forestry and the School of Design were established. Harrelson recruited Henry L. Kamphoefner to be the first dean of the school of design. Kamphoefner hired Professors James W. Fitzgibbon, Duncan Stuart, Edward Waugh, and George Matsumoto. Letters held in NC State’s Special Collections show that Chancellor Harrelson questioned their political loyalty, worrying that they might have political beliefs which aligned with communism. A letter fr…
creator: Emma Stout
date: 2021/04/07

Dan Allen Drive and Dan Allen Parking Deck
description: Dan Allen Drive borders important landmarks: Hillsborough Street, the Dan Allen Parking Deck, Witherspoon Student Center, Western Boulevard, and Greek Village. None of those buildings existed when Daniel Allen graduated from the college in 1896. Instead of a road name, Raleigh knew Daniel “Dan” Allen as a businessman and philanthropist as well as a proponent of white supremacy and segregationist housing policies. The school did not purchase the land under Dan Allen Parking Deck until 1987. That land was part of “House Creek district” in 1871, where Wake County’s fourth-highest population of African Americans lived according to a map by Fendol Bevers. The statistic eventually included Dr. Thomas Love, who purchased the lot in 1888. Part of the first generation in his family who learned to read according to the 1900 Census, Love and his brother opened Love’s Drug Store by 1910. They dispensed medical advice, along with tickets to local events the city forbade African Americans from buying elsewhere, according to N&O. In 1903, Love sold the land to his sister, Maggie, and her husband, physician Dr. Lovelace Capehart. George and Susan Capehart enslaved Lovelace as an infant in Bertie County, North Carolina, according to their list of enslaved people; Arthur Caldwell’s History of the American Negro and his Institutions reported that after the Civil War, no one advised Lovelace about receiving an education. Nevertheless, he earned law and medical degrees, which helped him nourish Raleigh's African American community as a physician and Shaw University professor. The N&O reported Maggie became an activist in 1939, when she and neighbors sued to stop the city from expropriating her next home on Smith Street. By 1934, the areas south and east of Capehart’s former property did belong to NC State, and a highway engineering professor said in a letter he sought “an underpass [under the train tracks] connecting the north and south sides of the State College campus.” A year later, …
creator: Alanna Natanson
date: 2021/03/31

Brooks Hall
description: Brooks Hall, off Pullen Road on North Carolina State University’s North Campus has a diverse history. It is the site where trailblazing professors who emigrated from around the world worked to inspire students. It housed the first library of the university. Its namesake, Eugene Clyde Brooks, was a complicated figure whose policies both enhanced and limited education. The physical building originally housed D.H. Hill Jr. Library, according to a 1925 Technician article. But after the library moved to a larger facility in 1955, scholar Robert “Bob” Burns said the School of Design (SOD) housed offices, studios, and classes in Brooks. By the time SOD moved in, Dean Henry Kamphoefner had hired a faculty that he told NC Architects “discarded the deadly eclecticism and senselessness of the American Beaux Arts to search for a new design expression compatible to modern times [and] committed to design as a social art.” Scholar Victoria Ballard Bell noted that at the suggestion of sociologist Lewis Mumford, Kamphoefner looked outside the United States for faculty, hiring “many leaders of the international Modernist movement.” From 1948-1959, professors and instructors came from Argentina, Austria, Australia, Chile, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Italy, Poland, and South Africa, according to Burns’ notes. In contrast, the 1956 catalog showed that the rest of the university’s faculty trained in just five countries. “Imagine having had teachers whose names were Parker, Allen and Grigg,” noted alumnus Marley Carroll, “now having professors named Buisson, Caminos, Catalano, Matsumoto, [and] Sengupta.” Scholar Paolo Favole argued Modernism travelled from Europe to the United States and was “revolutionary in character.” Early SOD appointees supported the claim; Maciej “Matthew” Nowicki was a Polish architect who resisted Nazi occupation with clandestine classes during World War II. He and wife Stanislava both taught at NC State, according to Student Publications, and Maciej de…
creator: Alanna Natanson
date: 2021/03/12

Caldwell Hall
description: Caldwell Hall is situated between Winston Hall and Tompkins Hall on Hillsborough Street. Built in 1981 and originally named Link Hall, due to the fact that it links Winston and Tompkins Hall together, it was renamed for former NC State Chancellor John Tyler Caldwell in 1987. Caldwell, former NCSU Chancellor who served from 1959 to 1975 presided over significant growth in the student body (enrollment more than doubled, reaching over 15,000 students by his retirement) as well as radical increases in the number of women attending. Many new degrees and colleges were added to NC State in the 1960s. Especially notable were the addition of the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in 1960, and the School of Liberal Arts in 1963. The History of the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences states NC State felt the new School was necessary in order to meet “the requirements of modern technology.” The School of Liberal Arts was created as a degree-granting school given to the former non-degree granting School of General Studies. Race was another issue at the forefront of Caldwell’s time as Chancellor. As described by John E. Batchelor in “Race and Education in North Carolina: From Segregation to Desegregation,” North Carolina’s response to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was slow, halting, and obstructive, with many people alarmed and angered by moves to desegregate schools. While NC State had admitted its first Black graduate student before this decision, in 1953, it did not admit its first Black undergraduate students until 1956. This all preceded Caldwell’s time as Chancellor, leaving him much to resolve. In 1959 when Caldwell became Chancellor, desegregation and race were still pressing issues for the school and continued to be so. In 1960, NC State had no official policy on accepting Black students from out of state. “The Inclusion and Involvement of African-Americans at North Carolina State University, 1953-1993,” details how Caldwell decided to…
creator: Emma Stout
date: 2021/04/03

Tompkins Hall
description: Tompkins Hall has been between Hillsborough Street and the Court of North Carolina on North Carolina State University’s North Campus since 1902, although students knew the mill-like structure as the “Textile Building” before 1918. Its namesake, Daniel Augustus Tompkins advanced textiles education at NC State but also promoted white supremacist views in the early 20th century. D.A. Tompkins was born on a South Carolina plantation on October 12, 1851, according to biographer George Winston. He moved north to study engineering and apprentice for the nation’s top steelmaker, Bethlehem Iron Works. After concluding that the South was poorer than the North because it imported food and produced only raw cotton, Tompkins “devoted his life to the promotion of cotton manufacturing industries and the diversification of Southern agriculture,” as Winston recounted. From Charlotte, North Carolina, Tompkins designed more than 300 textile mills, cotton seed oil refineries and electrical plants, according to scholar Gary Mock. Tompkins and others then lobbied for textile schools in both Carolinas like those in the North. He told the North Carolina House Committee on Education in 1899, “as we promote a knowledge of cotton milling, its cost is decreased.” North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (NC A&M) offered its first textile courses that year, but The Alumni News lamented that students “learned only by observation” at cotton mills.” So in 1900, the Board of Trustees (which included Tompkins) borrowed $10,000 from the NC General Assembly to “build and equip a Textile Department,” according to meeting minutes. In 1901, minutes show Tompkins designed the building. By 1902, Red and White articles reported, the building was almost complete enough for students to move $25,000 worth of real equipment—all donated by textile companies—into the space. Even though Thomas Nelson, Dean of the Textile Department, reported the building lacked electrical lights in 1906, his 1907 An…
creator: Alanna Natanson
date: 2020/28/01