Man's Best Friend

Landscape Architecture graduate student and Barn research team member Emily Wheeler notes the following based on her work in Special Collections:

On the south end of the Art Barn, above the original barn door and between the impressions of two horseshoes, is the phrase “Man’s Best Friend” (see photo, taken in summer 2008). This inscription dates back to the building’s use as the campus horse barn. In the 1943 yearbook the inscription is explained as being a cavalry motto, but it doesn’t seem that any cavalry regiment used this expression as a motto. Members of the cavalry, however, did sometimes use the phrase “man’s best friend” to describe horses. An article titled "Why Modern Armies Still Cling to the Cavalry,” in the November 1932 issue of Modern Mechanix and Inventions, states that the cavalry felt that "man's best friend, the horse" would always have a place in war. When the horse barn was built in 1919, most people probably thought that the horse would always have a place on campus, and some of the barn’s designers seem to have agreed that the horse, not the dog, was man’s best friend. At this point, however, the origin of the phrase at it appears on the barn is a mystery. If you know more about this, please leave us a comment!