A History of the Administration Building

* This history was compiled by Terrie Dopp Aamodt, professor of history and campus historian, for the Remembering the Ad Building event October 7, 2003. References to Walla Walla College and references to the future completion of the Ad Building are left in tact for historical accuracy.

In the summer and fall of 1892 an architectural wonder sprang up on a little hill a few miles outside of Walla Walla. It was tall—so tall its cupola could be seen from downtown Walla Walla, where Mayor Nelson G. Blalock and his business associates could view their brainchild whenever they wanted. In 1901, a history of the area called it “the most conspicuous building in the Walla Walla valley.”

The college building was extravagant—almost sinfully so. Fifteen-hundred Adventist folk of modest means in the Pacific Northwest put up a building whose intricate Victorian woodwork and nearly Gothic roofline towered above its brick superstructure. It suggested solidity, permanence, resistance to fire. Those were all an illusion. Behind those bricks, stacked up in a facade for four stories on top of the basement walls, are continuous chimney-like hollow spaces.

The location of the building, and the college, was controversial. For a time it seemed as if the only person who wanted it here was the board chair (and Upper Columbia Conference President) Henry W. Decker. He began construction work on the site in 1891, before the denomination even had title to the land, and by the time he laid the cornerstone—without fanfare—in May 1892, he had been fired.

The building was also expensive. Its cost to its constituency would compare to our constituency, today, putting up a $50 million campus all at once. It racked up a debt $50,000 more than the building fund contained. For a quarter of a century, that burden of debt clung to—and nearly dragged down—Walla Walla College. School managers often had to postpone payday for teachers and staff until enough income trickled in to cover the checks. In spite of all of these complications, or perhaps because of them, the rural residents of College Place quickly grew fond of the college building.“People were very pleased with its fine appearance,” recalled an eyewitness to the college’s opening many years later. “I heard a number of people say in those days that they thought such a fine building would surely be preserved in the New Earth.”

While the building may no longer be trailing enough clouds of glory to deem it worthy of translation, it has turned out to be nearly as resilient and adaptable as the institution it represents. Let me give you a few examples:

In December of 1892, the building contained classrooms for the college, an academy, and an elementary school, as well as dormitory space for most of the 91 students and lodging for most of the faculty, as well as a kitchen, dining room, chapel, and gymnasium. The kitchen was in the basement between North and South halls, the dining room was in the basement of South Hall, the gymnasium was in the basement of North hall, the college store and the college’s one short library shelf—I think it was 2 feet long—were found in the little office over the front stairs, the college president and registrar were housed on the second floor, just above the entrance.

On December 7, 1892, the day the college opened, its only building was not even close to being finished. The very active marketing specialists at the college had crowed about the electric lights and the central heating and the plumbing the building would have. These features would have made the building more habitable than most of the students’ homes, but on Opening Day there were no lights installed, there was no running water, and two portable wood stoves were the only source of heat. (For 16 years I occupied an office at the end of a hall in the ad building. When the heat wasn’t on in winter, I might as well have been in a tent.) The first chapel service had to meet in the basement gymnasium, because the stairs to the chapel were unfinished. After a few months, when students complained about not having running water for baths, General Conference president O. A. Olson airily suggested they take sponge baths.

It took two years for electric lights to supplant the smelly kerosene lamps in the dormitory wings. For seventeen years, water was piped from a spring two miles away and pumped to the basement by a hydraulic ram at the foot of the hill near North Hall. Students carried water to their rooms and washed their clothes on washboards. A few years down the road, when the use of electricity soared in 1918, the college board responded by charging for any extra electricity, in this fashion: “Voted that a 40-watt lamp be allowed for each dormitory room, and students desiring more light make arrangements at business office and pay at rate of 3 cents per watt per school period.”

So much has changed . . .

The fourth floor of this building, right under the cupola, was a busy place. It even housed a missions museum that encouraged students to carry on a missions career after college. That loft fourth story became the site of an interesting tale in early 1919, told in the words of a German teacher named Winifred Holmden:

“[In 1918] several of the College buildings were set on fire. We would lie awake nights wondering where the next one would break out. Fortunately they were discovered before much damage was done until the last one, which destroyed a large part of the top floor of the College. I shall always remember this one because of what happened the day before. On that day, during the dinner hour, I went to the fourth floor of the College to get a little stuffed owl out of a glass case. Suddenly a feeling of intense fear gripped me. I left hurriedly, as if pursued by some unseen spirit of evil. I could not understand it, nor can I account for it yet. But off this room was a closet with a low door. I glanced at it as I passed, and had the feeling that behind that door was something dangerous. It seemed so unreasonable to be afraid in broad day light at noon in a building with which I was perfectly familiar. The next day after my experience with the owl (which I did not get) the worst of all the fires broke out, and it apparently started in this closet.”

The January 1919 fire devastated the college. The student who did it was eventually caught and served a jail sentence. That top floor seemed awfully dangerous, so it was voted to remodel the space into an uninhabited attic. Space lost there was regained by widening the building by nearly 60 feet.

Even after all of these changes, the building’s metamorphoses had just begun. The wings at the rear of the building were dormitories until the 1950s. At various times the building also housed several academic departments, a radio station, all of the college administrators, and the college library.

Back when North and South Halls were separate buildings, before doors were cut through the walls that connected them to the mismatched floors of the main building, the outer porches were the only entrances. The North Hall porch is still a porch, but the South Hall porch was enclosed and for many years was Orpha Osborne’s office. More recently it housed a succession of staff members of the Admissions and Marketing department.

When I look at this building, I see a lot of faces. Iron-jawed administrators who kept the school alive through epidemics, fires, and financial disasters and sat grimly on stiff wooden chairs for the annual photograph. Mischievous students whose antics blurred the neat rows of faces on panoramic photographs. The Peach sisters, who, wearing billowing nightgowns, ran back and forth between rooms on the fourth floor outdoor ledge after lights out. Serious-faced faculty members who were expected to work in industries alongside the students, live next door to them on the dormitory halls, toe the administrative line, keep a close watch from the cupola for outbreaks of student affection, and NOT have their hair bobbed.

So much has changed . . .

Yet although the faces that have occupied that building for 111 years have constantly changed, many other things about what that building represents and what this college represents remain the same. Several threads run through the changes embodied in this building:

• Belief in Divine Providence when human solutions offered no hope a clear educational vision.

• The strong will of people who would not take “no” for an answer, people like H. W. Decker, M. E. Cady, William Landeen, Ernest Booth, and Wilma Hepker, people who were too tenacious to give up when what passed for the prevailing wisdom of the day urged them to accept things the way they were.

• A determined spirit enabled the school to go on doing what it set out to accomplish in its first statement of mission: to provide young people with “a Christian education, surrounded with influences favorable to the development of Christian character.”

That goal is essentially the same today, and it asks all of us to develop a deep and abiding spiritual relationship with Jesus Christ.

This building has been the strong nuclear force on this campus. The atomization of the Ad Building is well underway. We look forward to the day when the scattered particles will unite again in a new home that honors the best of the first two main buildings on campus. Someday this campus will again have a nerve center. So much has changed, and will continue to change. And so much remains the same.