Standing tall on Illinois College’s hilltop campus, Sturtevant Hall is perhaps the best known symbol of the state’s oldest college.
Despite its now-revered status, construction of the building was not guaranteed after disaster struck the campus on Dec. 30, 1852. It was on that winter night that fire destroyed the four-story dormitory building.
IC President Julian Sturtevant was despondent over the loss of the dormitory and especially over the fact that part of the insurance coverage on the building had lapsed.
At a public meeting soon after the fire, Sturtevant announced that the college might have to move to another community. Fortunately, friends of the college provided generous financial support for construction of what Sturtevant called a “dignified building suitable for general college purposes.”
However, Sturtevant did not want another dormitory on the campus. He believed that students who lived with families made for “more regular, more studious, and much more moral” students.
Plans for a new college building were developed in January 1853. Sturtevant thought $20,000 would cover the costs of constructing a building containing a chapel, a library, rooms for a minerals cabinet and scientific equipment, lecture rooms and five recitation rooms. It was to be “a college edifice worthy of the wealth and civilisation [sic] of the county,” Sturtevant wrote in a letter to his longtime friend and IC trustee Theron Baldwin.
IC’s board of trustees awarded the design contract to William Rumbold, a St. Louis architect who, in the late 1850s, designed the iron dome for the St. Louis County Courthouse in downtown St. Louis.
Construction on the college building began in 1854, but work proceeded slowly because of a lack of money; it took nearly three years to complete the two-story brick building. The college finally began using the structure in fall 1857. At that time, it housed classrooms, a library and a chapel.
At the recommendation of President Edward A. Tanner, the building was named Sturtevant Hall in 1888, in honor of the man who oversaw its construction.
The building was the setting for many student pranks over the years. Herbert French Atkins, an 1885 IC graduate, recalled one particularly hair-raising tale in a story he wrote in 1938. “Professor [Mason] Grosvenor’s one personal vanity was a wig which he supposed that no one could detect,” Atkins wrote. “One day, [while he was] lecturing to a class of seniors upon moral philosophy, a group of students who had bored holes in the chapel floor let down a thread with a fishhook attached. They jerked his wig off and hauled it up to the ceiling, then lowered it down temptingly to him when he mounted the desk to retrieve it.”
Late one August night in 1920, President Charles H. Rammelkamp heard the crackling of flames and discovered that Sturtevant Hall was burning. The fire gutted the building, but its walls and towers were left standing.
Sturtevant Hall’s interior was soon rebuilt, with more space made for biology and chemistry laboratories. In 1965, the building was remodeled to provide more classrooms and faculty offices.
Air conditioning, an elevator, new lighting fixtures, new windows and new restrooms were installed in Sturtevant Hall in 1993 during a $1.3 million restoration and remodeling project.
Sturtevant Hall has withstood the ravages of time and the elements. It has survived fires, lightning strikes, windstorms and vandalism, as well as three major remodeling projects.
The soft brick exterior walls of the nearly 160-year-old building are like the well-worn pages of a history of IC. Generations of students have carved their initials there, perhaps just to remind college officials that they once passed that way.
Longtime IC President Donald Mundinger summed up the importance of the building when it underwent its 1993 reincarnation.
“Sturtevant Hall ranks as Illinois College’s most prominent symbol and its distinct towers mean so much to the thousands of men and women who have passed through its doors,” Mundinger said.
This Way We Were story was first published Aug. 9, 2004.
