Campus of Michigan State University - History

History

See also: History of Michigan State University

Before the white settlement of the region, the area that is now East Lansing was a combination of dense virgin oak forest and tamarack swampland. In July 1855 a 677 acre site just north of the Red Cedar River was recommended to the State Board of Education, the report to the board noted that except for the occasional clearing the land was dense hardwood forest. It was in one of these "oak openings" that the school built its first three buildings in 1856: a multipurpose building called College Hall, a dormitory building later known as "Saints' Rest," and a barn. College Hall contained classrooms, offices, laboratories, a library/museum, and a multifunctional lecture hall/chapel. It was also one of the first buildings in America to be used for the teaching of scientific agriculture.

Since the college was founded in a sparsely populated area with only a handful of nearby farmhouses, and it was an arduous stagecoach ride from Lansing, the College built four faculty houses in the first year of classes in 1857. One of these original faculty houses, Cowles House, still exists as the President's official residence, though only two walls and part of the foundation remain of the original construction. Ultimately, ten faculty homes were built on campus between 1857 and 1885. Besides Cowles House, one other survived and was moved into the city of East Lansing; the rest were demolished between 1922 and 1948 to make room for the north complex of residence halls and the Student Union, designed by Pond and Pond.

Michigan State's campus was among the first to serve as a botanical laboratory for its faculty and students and is the site of what is, today, the oldest continuously operated botanical garden in the US. In December 1879, Professor William J. Beal buried seeds of 23 common plants in 20 jars of sand (to prevent water accumulation) in various locations around campus. At certain fixed intervals, currently every 20 years, a jar is dug up to determine which seeds still germinate after their prolonged periods of unlit isolation. The most recent jar exhumation, April 2000, found only a few specimens surviving to germinate, notably Verbascum blattaria (moth mullein), after 120 years. Five buried jars remain, with the next unearthing scheduled for 2020.

In 1871, President Abbott proposed that the Board of Trustees "take steps to provide for the proper layout of the college grounds, planting of trees, location of buildings, etc., by a competent landscape gardener, as soon as means can be spared." In 1872, Adam Oliver, a landscape gardener from Kalamazoo, was hired. During his tenure from 1872–1887, he was oversaw the layout of walks and drives and the placement of numerous buildings, including Linton Hall in 1881. He was responsible for the closed roadway system, an altered form of which remains today as West Circle Drive, and was also responsible for the informal arrangement of campus buildings. The character of the campus is described in President Abbott's 1882 report to the Board as follows: "There are in the park no straight rows of buildings or of trees, but its...buildings...are separated by undulating lawns, shallow ravines, and groups of trees".

In 1906 O. C. Simonds a well-known prairie school landscape architect was hired, he simplified the road system, planned walks and planting areas. It was Sidmons who first described this area around West Circle Drive as a "sacred space" and who reaffirmed the idea of as area of campus as a park to be protected from development. In a 1906 letter to the Board for Trustee's "This area is, I am sure, that feature of the College which is most pleasantly and affectionately remembered by the students after they leave their Alma Mater, and I doubt if any instruction given has a greater effect upon their lives."

In 1914 the college hired noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. with bigger buildings like Olds and Agriculture Halls being built Olmstead faced the challenge of maintaining the informal character of campus while minimizing walking distance. In 1915, the Olmsted Brothers firm issued a report its solution was a dramatic redesign of campus around quadrangles However, the plan was unpopular with students and alumni who wished to maintain the informal parklike feel of campus. After eight years of consulting and little in way of changes the school ended its relationship with Olmsted in 1922.

The college in 1923 hired T. Glenn Phillips, Phillips' 1926 plan for campus kept Simonds' "sacred space" and it continued the curvilinear road system to the east, with buildings placed in an informal manner. His plan called for campus north of the river to be dedicated to academic purposes while all agriculture and athletic facilities were to be placed south of the river. Phillips' plan would set the tone for campus development for the next 25 years.

Post WWII the large number of GI's returning, President John A. Hannah's push to expand resulting in a large increase in enrollment quickened in the pace of development south of the river. The driving factor in campus development of was the automobile this the south featuring buildings and streets generally laid out in a grid system with more land dedicated to parking lots. This growth resulted in the largest residence hall system in the United States. 16,000 students live in MSU's 23 undergraduate halls, one graduate hall, and three apartment villages. Though MSU has not built a new resident hall since 1967, it has modernized several of its dormitories. In 2007, MSU opened the Residential College in Arts & Humanities in a newly renovated Snyder-Phillips Hall, the location of MSU's first residential college, Justin Morrill College.

In 2001 a new master plan called 2020 Vision: A Community Concept for the MSU Campus was developed to guide future campus development. Amongst the recommendations it called for the removing of central campus parking to parking garages replacing it with green space, the removal of head-in parking around West and East Circle Drives, adding more bike lanes and planting more trees on south campus in order to give it the look and feel of north campus.