Trying to Get a Hold of Part of It

Thad Box, Dean Emeritus of the College of Natural Resources, shared with us some of his memories of the barn in the days when it was considered valuable real estate on USU campus.

Thad Box came to USU as a professor in 1959 when he was fresh out of graduate school at Texas A&M. He remembers the barn at that time still showed traces of its former use as a horse barn, with some pens still remaining around it.

He got to know the barn better later. "It wasn't until after I came back here in 1970 as dean of the College of Natural Resources, and my office was right across there, and we were just growing like mad during those days. We had over 1400 students in natural resources in the early 60s. We were adding new faculty and looking for new graduate student space. We were out of space, so I saw that big barn there and I started trying to get a hold of part of it. By that time the Art Department had it pretty well used as their Art Barn for classes and labs and so on, but I was able to get part of the second floor, and I think we put in seven or eight offices on the second floor. They were mostly graduate students and new faculty members. By then I was in the barn practically every day for a couple of years . . ."

Apparently the Art Department and College of Natural Resources managed to get along fairly well while they shared the barn. In fact, some of the natural resources graduate students modeled for the drawing classes.

Thad Box also remembers another incident involving models in the Art Barn that occurred in the late 60s or early 70s: "Gerald Sheratt (he is mayor of St. George now, he went down there to be their president of Southern Utah University), he was the university beggar, the development officer, at the time and very good at that. He was a very modest sort of guy, nothing off color around Gerry. One day he was bringing a group of donors they were trying to get money from; I don't know if it was money to redo that building or what, but he had a number of men and women both and he brought them around by our offices and then he took them up to the third floor. He walked in on an art class with a nude model sitting there. He got them out of there so quickly it was sort of a standing joke over there about how fast he got the donors out of there. I don't think it was well known at that time that they were having art classes with nude models."