UpDate - Vol. 15, No. 2, Page 6
September 7, 1995
At Convocation; UD historian traces the legacy of campus Mall

   On Aug. 8, as part of the news conference announcing the $15
   million Gore family gift to the University for construction of
   a new classroom building on the Mall, Carol Hoffecker,
   Richards Professor of History, presented the following history
   of the University Mall and its buildings.

     Today, we are witnesses to the fulfillment of a dream that had
its beginnings over eighty years ago. In 1915, there was no University
of Delaware. There were two small, single-sex colleges under the aegis
of one board of trustees: Delaware College, with an enrollment of
about 225 male students, was centered at Old College on a campus
constricted by the tracks of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and Main
Street, and the Women's College of Delaware, then in its first year,
was located on a separate campus near the corner of South College
Avenue and Park Place.
     "The half-mile strip that separated these two institutions was
known as "no man's land." It was mainly agricultural and included
peach and apple orchards, some marshy lowland, a few scattered houses
and an old tavern.
     "But, a renaissance was under way. Hugh Rodney Sharp, a Delaware
College graduate recently appointed to the board of trustees, believed
that his alma mater had the potential to achieve greatness, and he
enlisted the support of his brother-in-law, Pierre S. du Pont, to help
realize his vision.
     "In 1915, du Pont anonymously purchased 'no man's land' for the
college. Sharp and President Samuel Chiles Mitchell then moved quickly
to hire the nation's most distinguished architects of collegiate
structures, Frank Miles Day and his partner, Charles Z. Klauder, to
provide a development plan for the newly acquired land.
     "Day and Klauder had earned their reputation by designing
buildings in the then-popular Gothic style for such prestigious
clients as Princeton, Yale, Cornell and the University of
Pennsylvania. But, the architects proved equally at home in the
colonial Georgian idiom that Rodney Sharp thought suitable for the
First State.
     "Rodney Sharp loved Delaware's rich architectural heritage.
Throughout the state, venerable buildings of brick and wood recalled
their 18th-century builders' respect for classical antiquity and its
supreme virtues of symmetry, proportion and balance. At Sharp's
suggestion, Frank Miles Day traveled Delaware's dusty roads to make
notes on architectural design motifs that he would later incorporate
into buildings along this Mall.
     "The most important first step in the transformation of "no man's
land" was not the design of any particular building, but rather the
design of the new campus itself. Drawing on the concepts of symmetry
and balance so dear to the 18th century, especially as they had been
so elegantly and impressively realized in Thomas Jefferson's design
for the Lawn at the University of Virginia, Frank Day conceived of the
plan for a Mall-originally to be called "The Green"-to begin at Main
Street and converge on a large central building that would be capped
by a massive rotunda.
     "The Mall was to extend beyond the central building to unite the
men's campus with the women's campus. Today, you see before you the
Day and Klauder plan of 1917, only slightly revised in this version of
1928 [see page 7], which is remarkably like the finished product.
     "With the construction of Gore Hall, the planners' concept will
finally be realized in its entirety. Once the layout of the Mall had
been defined, construction could begin. Within a year of the land
purchase, the first two structures were under way, both financed by
P.S. du Pont and named for Rodney Sharp's favorite teachers: Harter
Hall, a dormitory and Wolf Hall, which was to house science
laboratories and an auditorium.
     "When the construction of these buildings was completed in 1917,
students helped to plant the rows of elm trees along the Mall, many of
which, in defiance of Dutch elm disease, continue to define the Mall
today, their overarching branches providing shade in summer and a
graceful, yet rugged, beauty in all seasons. A photograph taken at the
time shows the young trees, their tops hardly higher than the first
floor of Wolf Hall.
     "In 1918, at Rodney Sharp's suggestion, the board hired Marian
Cruger Coffin to provide a landscape plan for the entire campus. A
graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Marian Coffin
was among America's outstanding landscape architects and the Mall that
we see before us today represents the ideas and aesthetics that guided
her, Frank Miles Day and their patron, Rodney Sharp.
     "At the beginning of the 1920s, the coordinate colleges were
joined in name as the University of Delaware, a development that
reinforced the way the Mall had linked the two colleges spatially. The
first building constructed for the use of students of both Delaware
College and the Women's College was the Memorial Library, dedicated in
1924 to honor those Delawareans who gave their lives in the First
World War.
     "It was fitting that this unifying structure was chosen to occupy
the central position on the Mall. The building was financed by small
gifts from Delawareans, including school children, capped by a
substantial donation from Rodney Sharp.
     "In the late 1920s, two buildings were designed to face one
another to define the cross-axis of the Mall. For that purpose, they
were recessed from other existing and proposed structures along the
Mall. These buildings were Mitchell Hall, the University's first
auditorium for the performing arts, dedicated in 1930, another gift
from Rodney Sharp, and Evans Hall, its partner across the Mall, built
by the state to serve as classrooms and laboratories for the school of
engineering.
     "In the Depression decade that followed, the University was
fortunate to find a new benefactor whose gifts made it possible to
continue developing the Mall. Harry Fletcher Brown, a Harvard-educated
executive at the Du Pont Co., was devoted to improving educational
opportunities for Delawareans.
     "In 1937, Brown financed the construction of the chemistry
laboratory that now bears his name. The following year, he provided
the matching funds, which, together with federal support from the
Public Works Administration, financed the construction of the
building's twin, now called Hullihen Hall, which was designated to
house the central administration and the humanities departments.
     "These two buildings, notable for the distinctive oval
indentations on their facades that have been painted white for
emphasis, were connected to the Memorial Library by archways. These
additions, designed by Charles Z. Klauder, harmoniously completed a major
focal point in the Mall's overall design.
     "Although the post World War II period was one of dramatic growth
at the University, it was not until 1958 that the Mall saw its next
addition.
     "Du Pont Hall, financed by the Good Samaritan and Longwood
Foundations for the College of Engineering, acknowledged the many
gifts that P.S. du Pont had provided to the University during his
lifetime. In 1962, the state provided the funds to construct Sharp
Laboratory, which honors another magnificent friend to the University,
to house the Department of Physics.
     "One third of a century has passed since that last addition to
the portion of the Mall that lies between Memorial Hall and Delaware
Avenue. During that time University students, faculty, and
administrators have hoped for the opportunity to complete this most
central part of the Mall in the way envisioned by those early
planners. We have long been in need of additional classrooms that such
a building can provide, and we dared to hope that we might build a
structure of outstanding architectural merit to complete the dream
that Rodney Sharp envisaged for this University.
     "If he, together with P.S. Du Pont, H. Fletcher Brown, architects
Frank Miles Day and Charles Z. Klauder, landscape designer Marian Coffin,
and presidents Samuel Chiles Mitchell and Walter Hullihen could be
here today, they would surely rejoice with us that the Gore family has
come forward to complete the task they so ably and so ambitiously
began eight decades ago."