1912 Precedent for Utah State University Welcome Center and Museum

The transformation of the Art Barn into the USU Welcome Center and Museum of Anthropology is a creative idea and an excellent reuse for a historic building, but we were surprised to find that campus plans from 1912 in the USU archives show that a similar idea was considered at least once before in USU's history.

The campus plans, pictured below, were drawn up while the old horse barn, or Model Barn, was still standing just to the northeast of Old Main. These plans called for the old horse barn to be replaced by new agricultural buildings, including a building called "Museum of Agriculture, etc." These campus plans were never fully realized, and the museum wasn't built, but if it had been, it would have been a focal point on the north side of the quad.

Back in those days, 400 North was a main approach to the campus, which was centered on the quad. The main entrance to the quad from 400 North would have brought students and visitors right up to the agriculture museum, and it's easy to imagine the "etc." in the museum's name meant it was going to serving as a welcome center as well because of its dominant location and size.

Though the agricultural museum wasn't built, the agricultural history of USU and Cache Valley will still be memorialized on campus through the rehabilitation of the Art Barn into the USU Welcome Center and Museum of Anthropology. During the rehabilitation project the facade of the building will be restored to the extent possible to resemble the barn its its first function as a horse barn. This will allow an important historic building on campus to find a new purpose while still serving as a reminder of USU's past. Of course, it's also fitting that the new Department of Agriculture building is being built across from Old Main on the quad, bringing agriculture full circle on campus.

The images below are renderings of the 1912 campus plans. The top sketch of the plans shows an aerial view of the quad from the south, with Old Main Hill on the left side of the picture, and 400 North and Logan's "Island" at the bottom. The agriculture museum is the large building on the north side of the quad with numerous sidewalks converging on it. The bottom image shows the landscape plans with Old Main Hill on the bottom of the image and the complex of proposed agricultural buildings on the left side.

It Wasn't Quiet at All

Kevin Krogh, professor of Spanish at USU, was one of the last people to have an office in the barn before its upper floors were condemned. He recalls the active social atmosphere of the barn in its last years as office space.

Dr. Krogh described the layout of the barn during his time there:

“Downstairs there were four or five offices and a conference room on the west side of the main floor. The four of us in our department were all over there. Harold Kinzer had an office on the second floor. There was a classroom on the second floor. On the third floor, who knows what was going on there; there were all kinds of people in a small space. I think it was a software producing business connected in some way with the university. Downstairs also was the rat lab, and the psychology department grad students were who they were, four or five students on the east side of the main floor.”

The layout of the building contributed to the noisy, social atmosphere of the barn:

“It wasn’t quiet at all. The psychology graduate students who ran the rat lab, their office wasn’t entirely enclosed; it was a half wall. You couldn’t see over the wall. There was probably a space of a foot and a half to two feet between the ceiling and the wall. It was a large space, and that was open to the main entrance area where students would come that were in the speech program to be interviewed by other graduate students. So there were people in and out all the time. It was really quite noisy. If you wanted quiet you had to shut your door because the graduate students were always chatting; students were always waiting in the hall for interviews in the conference room.”

Because his office window was directly across from the kiosk at the exit to the parking lot, where people stopped to pay for parking, he would often shut the window to keep out the sounds of the cars and the parking lot attendant talking to drivers. Unfortunately, the building was very hot in summer, so having both the door and the window shut to have some quiet would become stifling. Dr. Krogh recalled coming in very early in the morning in the summer to avoid the heat. In the winter the building was heated by steam, but it was often still cold in the barn during the winter, and the steam heat could also have some negative effects, as he discovered on one occasion:

"I came to the office, and when I opened the door to the main office I could hear this hissing sound. I thought, ‘What in the world is that?’ As I got closer to my office door I could hear the hissing sound was coming from my office . . . also I could feel that it was kind of humid in there. When I opened the office I discovered that the steam valve in the office had broken. Steam was going everywhere, and water was dripping off the ceiling, off my books, and onto my desk. You could see water everywhere.”

Apparently the barn had frequent maintenance problems, because Dr. Krogh recalls that "There were people from maintenance, USU physical facilities, there all the time, fixing things all the time, replacing valves, wires. They were doing something all the time it seemed.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, the inconveniences of having an office in the barn, there was a real camaraderie among the professors who had offices there:

“The four or five of us that were there, we identified ourselves as those in the Barn. Everybody else in our department were over here in Old Main. We supported each other and we had the camaraderie of being in the Barn. You get to know somebody if you are walking across campus from your office in the Barn to Old Main where you are teaching or back. It was a great opportunity to get to know people. The people around me right now, I know them fairly well, but not as well, and I don’t feel the closeness as a colleague as I did with those who were in the Barn, even though they weren’t in my discipline. But I just knew them better because we had more opportunity to converse and to talk about things. Things kind of get boring over there in the Barn when you are there for a while, so you would go down the hall and visit with a person in the office down the hall.”

The camaraderie among the people in the Art Barn was what made it a special place to many of the people who had offices there.

Barn Phone Directory Listings

Using the campus phone directories in the USU archives, barn research team member Jason Neil has compiled a list of all the professors and groups that had offices or phone extensions in the barn throughout the years.

Offices were not a part of the original function or design of the barn. In its years as a horse barn there were no offices in the barn, and during the Art Barn years, throughout the 1960s and 70s, only Larry Elsner and, starting in 1967, Adrian Van Suchtelen, had barn offices.

After the Art Department moved into its new building at the end of the 1970s, however, the function of the barn changed again. From 1980 until early 1983 there were no offices listed in the barn, and perhaps the building was vacant, but then in the 1983-1984 academic year, the Psychology Department's basic behavior lab and a few people from the Range Science Department were listed in the directory as barn residents.

Until the 2006-2007 school year the barn continued to be home to a number of departments and people, including at various times members of the Biology Department, Psychology Department, Poisonous Plant Research Lab, National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management, Rocky Mountain Dairy Herd Improvement Association, Animal, Dairy, and Veterinary Science Department, and Language, Philosophy, and Speech Communication Department.

The barn has remained an important part of the campus landscape and many people's USU experiences over the years because of the many functions that it has served.

Below are some of Jason Neil's summaries of the listings from the USU campus phone directories. Click on the images to be able to zoom in and read the lists of people who had offices in the barn from the 1980s to the 2000s.

A Lot of Fun at the Art Barn

Rose Milovich, the Preservation Manager and Exhibition Program Director for USU's Special Collections and Archives, took classes in the Art Barn in the late 1970s. She shared with us some of her memories of the Art Barn and the camaraderie among students there.

Ms. Milovich studied ceramics in the Art Barn and was involved with raku, a Japanese form of pottery. She related some stories about doing raku at the barn:

". . . they used to have the raku kilns at the back of the barn and there was a kind of a fence around it. There was a cluster of students who were there eighteen to twenty four hours a day and I was one of those students. We would eat together and fire pots and make pots. One of our friends Masihiro decided that we should cook dinner over the raku kilns, and so he made fried rice over the raku kiln . . . It was a lot of fun; it was like a family. We were all different people and all from different places. We helped each other . . . We would take turns [watching the kilns] and relieve each other. Somebody would stay there for three hours, somebody else would stay for six, somebody else would go through the night.”

In fact, she remembers a lot of students staying in the Art Barn all night:

“That wasn’t uncommon. It was actually pretty common. There were a few couches around. The drawing studio was on the third level. There was a little loft on the top and a little ladder you could go up if you wanted to sleep. You could bring a sleeping bag. Now you would never think of doing that . . . It’s a whole different world of security and safety.”

She also offered some details about the interior of the Art Barn in the last years before the new art building was completed and the barn was transformed into offices and labs:

“When I was taking ceramics in the Art Barn there was an area that was set aside for glazes and doing glaze work. That was on the east side of the building, pretty much the whole length of it. On the west side, the larger part, they had all the potter's wheels. They had some kick wheels and they also had some Shimpo electric wheels…The second floor when I was there was strictly sculpture. The third floor was drawing. There was some jewelry casting that was taught underneath sculpture. They did some metal casting.

"My most vivid memory is walking in and seeing all the potter's wheels and the clay all over the place. They had a room that was humidified so that your ceramics wouldn’t dry out too quickly. You would walk through it and you would have to go through it sideways because it was so small. If you turned this way you would knock somebody’s pots over.”

Art Barn Class Schedules

Barn research team member Jason Neil has taken on the challenge of creating a complete list of all the professors who taught or had offices in the Art Barn over the years. He is using USU Special Collections resources such as campus phone directories, bulletins, and class schedules to compile the list. Below are excerpts from three class schedules that he found, one for summer semester 1962, one for fall semester 1970, and one for spring semester 1971. These show some of the professors teaching in the Art Barn and the types of classes they taught there. The Art Barn is abbreviated as "AB" in these class schedules. Click on the images to open them up and be able to zoom in to read them better.

An Appropriate Use for an Enduring Building

It is easy to forget that the Art Barn was once part of a complex of barns and corrals located where the Taggart Student Center and parking lot are today. Those other barns were removed during the 1950s and the animals moved to North Logan, but some people remember when they were a vital part of campus. Dr. Newel Daines, former mayor of Logan and an active participant in historic preservation in Cache Valley, shared with us some of his memories of the barn from his childhood during the 1930s. His earliest interactions with the campus barns occurred when his family took their cows to campus to be bred to the bull that was kept there to improve local herds. He still remembers his early impressions of the horse barn:

"I remember it was a big oval-top barn that had a Jackson fork that came out of one end that they would haul hay into the loft of the barn, and it was a beautiful building at that time . . . It had an attic and everything else was on the ground floor. There were stables in there for the horses to be separated."

His other interactions with the horse barn show that it was an important part of campus and of Cache Valley. His mother rode in some of the community-wide horse shows that were held on campus, and Dr. Daines remembers that among the "outstanding horses" in those shows were the college's horses, which were stabled in the horse barn across the street from the old stadium where the shows were held. He also shared how the barn was part of the childhood education of many Logan school children:

"I was a student at the Whittier School, which is on the corner of 3^rd North and . . . 4^th East [now the Whittier Community Center], and since it was the school we would go up there on trips to examine the barn and see what was going on at that time . . . We would walk up there and look at the barn and see what was going on in the barn and see the horses that were in that barn. It was an interesting thing for a nine or a ten year old to do."

Dr. Daines has enjoyed seeing the horse barn remain throughout the years, especially since he remembers it from its first function as a horse barn. He says, "It is a good example of the buildings that have endured for a long period of time . . . now that it will ultimately be a museum, it seems appropriate."


Above: This undated image from the USU archives shows the campus barns. The horse barn is at the right end of the barn complex, and cattle judging is taking place in roughly the current location of the University Inn and Conference Center. Below: This image shows a view of the barns in the 1940s if one was standing with their back to the horse barn. This area is now a parking lot.