Campus History
The land where the campus now exists was once a farm owned by the Hartenbach family. The family home still stands today and faces Brodhead Road, and the barn once stood on the present site of the Brodhead Cultural Center's amphitheater. The main part of the campus’s grounds has served multiple purposes throughout the years. One of its main functions was as the Beaver County Tuberculosis Sanitorium, which opened on February 14, 1923. The building, which later served as the Penn State Beaver administration building from 1965 until 2004 when the Ross Administration Building was opened, held 20 beds and its primary physicians were Drs Fred and Ruth Wilson.
As tuberculosis cases began to decline in the Beaver County area the sanitorium was closed in the early 1950s. For a short time after this, the building was used as an annex for the Beaver County Geriatric Hospital before it was moved to its new location on Dutch Ridge Road in 1963. It was also around this time that that Hartenbach farm was sold to Pennsylvania State University with a contingent that Ralph Hartenbach and his wife could live in their house until their deaths.
The Beaver County Commissioners donated the old sanitorium and the land around it to Penn State. In the fall of 1965, Penn State Beaver admitted 97 students for its first semester. Each student paid $525 for two semesters.
Read more about this topic: Penn State Beaver
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)