The Story of University Hall

The year is 1886. A horse drawn stagecoach slowly makes its way through acres of potato fields, kicking up dust from the dry and sun drenched land. The sunshine beams down on the fields as a group of trustees from the University of Denver leave all the comforts and discomforts of an 1800’s stagecoach ride to step out into the sun and inspect this farmland. Donated to them by Rufus Clark, a notably successful local potato farmer, community leader and businessman, these acres would be developed into a brand new campus for the University of Denver to occupy.

Among the trustees there that day is John Evans, the former governor of what was then the territory of Colorado. Evans had made the journey straight to the territorial capital of Denver from Washington, D.C. after being appointed to the governorship by Abraham Lincoln in 1862. Unlike most residents of Colorado during the rough and tumble wild west era, Evans came to the frontier an educated man. Born in Ohio in 1814, when that land was the newfound frontier of America, Evans graduated from medical school in 1838. He kept heading west, first to Indiana and then to the fast growing frontier city of Chicago in 1848, where he heavily invested in real estate development. Having converted to the Methodist faith during his time in Indiana, Evans joined with a group of fellow Methodists to found Northwestern University in Illinois in 1850.

Denver was still a very new city when Evans had arrived there in 1862, having been founded only four years before. Aside from his duties as governor, Evans quickly made a name for himself in the development of the new city, as he had done in Chicago. He oversaw the construction of many new churches and railroads in the area, and built a large, stately brick home for himself in what is now Downtown Denver. Using the money he earned from that development, he would once again call on his Methodist faith to found another university. The Colorado Seminary was founded in 1864 as a Methodist seminary and the first institution of higher education in Colorado, a far older founding than even many universities back east can claim.

This new seminary would struggle in its first years of existence. It shut down briefly because of financial troubles before reopening in 1880 under its new name, the University of Denver. Although still small in size, the school’s Downtown location came with the problems of life in the center of a western city founded as a mining camp by people who were more concerned with making their fortune in gold mining than of having any sense of moral decency. Outside of the school’s building, drunken men stumbled out of the neighboring saloons and through the dusty streets at all hours of the day. Addicts stumbled their way into opium dens. Prostitutes peaked out from the windows of the many nearby brothels. This was certainly not the ideal location for an institute of higher education.

In contrast, the quiet potato fields seemed the perfect place to lay out plans for a grand new campus. About five consequential miles from the urban center of Denver, the land was close enough for the University to keep its connection to the city but far enough that its students could escape the moral issues there, finding breathing room in what was then completely undeveloped land outside of the city limits of Denver.

It is now 1890. It has been four years since Rufus Clark’s potato fields were donated to the struggling University. Men and women have made their way out to the barren fields, on horses and on foot, to witness the groundbreaking of what will be the first building of the new campus. The people mill about under the hot sunshine. The men stand in their wide brimmed and bowler hats. A woman near the front enjoys the shady respite of an umbrella. All have their eyes glued on the foundation of the new building. A primitive wooden crane rises up from the foundation, and a sign stands above everyone showing a rendering of what the new building will look like when it is finally completed. A cornerstone, the first piece of the new building above the foundation, is laid down. It reads “The University of Denver. This Cornerstone Was Laid April 3rd A.D. 1890. Pro Scientia Et Religione”—For Science and Religion.

Slowly but surely, the new building rises up from the fields. Tan-grey lava rock is quarried in Castle Rock, Colorado and carried the 20 miles to the new campus site to cover the outside of the new Richardsonian Romanesque style building. Finally, later that year, the building opens to the public. The University of Denver’s students can finally leave behind the distracting and morally questionable behaviors of Downtown and move their studies to the grand new hall. The rest of the land still lies undeveloped as the first students make their way to the hall; it rises up from the dusty fields like a castle in the middle of an undeveloped prairie. From the top of the rounded, southwest facing corner, students can look out at the completely unobstructed view of the miles of open fields that give way to the majestic Rocky Mountains, rising up out of the earth like the walls of a giant’s fortress.

Everything the University needed had to fit into that one building then—a chapel, gymnasium, library and all the classrooms the school could offer its students were packed into the same building, by then known to the students and administrators alike as University Hall. As the student body grew, the campus did as well. More buildings were added as the University moved out of its time of more dire finances and was able to construct other spaces for the variety of needs the students had, eventually leading to a fully built out and breathtakingly gorgeous campus.

As these new buildings were added, University Hall was asked to do far less than what it was required to hold in its earlier days. Although today it is mostly an administrative building that many University of Denver students may never or only occasionally go into, University Hall continues to stand on campus as a reminder of the University’s rich history and the early days of the campus, when the building stood alone as the one symbol of the University and its bright future to come.