Vol. 17, No. 20	Feb. 19, 1998

History of the Heart of the campus

by Carol Hoffecker

Richards Professor of History

This article is excerpted from remarks presented by Hoffecker
on Aug. 8, 1995, at the ceremony announcing the Gore family's gift to build Gore Hall.

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."

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. But, the architects proved equally at home in the colonial Georgian idiom that Rodney Sharp thought suitable for the First State. 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, 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.

Within a year of the land purchase, the first two structures were under way, both financed by P.S. duPont 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.

In 1918, at Rodney Sharp's suggestion, the board hired Marian Cruger Coffin to provide a landscape plan for the entire campus. 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. In the late 1920s, two buildings were designed to face one another to define the cross-axis of 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.. Harry Fletcher Brown, a Harvard-educated executive at the Du Pont Co., financed the construction in 1937 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.

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. 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.

If Sharp, together with du Pont, Brown, architects Day and Klauder, landscape designer Coffin, and presidents Mitchell and 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.

--Photo University Archives