Horse Crazy

Alice Cardon Crockett, who sent us a story about the time she rode U-Dandy (one of the stud horses kept at USU in the horse barn days), shared with us some more of her childhood memories of the barn and Logan. She described herself as "horse crazy," and she and her friends would often visit the horses in the barn.

Ms. Crockett remembers that there was an alfalfa field where the LDS Institute of Religion now stands, and she would pick alfalfa for the horses on her way to the barn. "And if it didn't seem like quite enough, and if U-Dandy looked especially hungry, I'd just go up into the haystack and get some more for him. . . . We played a lot in that hayloft. It was really fun, but after you'd bounced around a lot it gets kind of dusty, and that's when we'd kind of give it up and do something else." She said this "just drove the groundskeeper wild."

In addition to U-Dandy, she remembers that the name of another horse in the barn was Seabiscuit (not the famous racehorse Seabiscuit). "[The names] were written right above, so that you knew all their names, and those are the only two I can remember. And they were the two who had the bigger paddocks, because they were at the end [the south end of the barn]. And when I think about it, I'm not even sure the other horses had their names over their stalls."

Ms. Crockett said that she learned to ride horses at Dunbar Stables in Logan's "Island," and they would ride to Providence through the orchard of Edgewood Hall, an old abandoned estate that was said to be haunted, perhaps because a child supposedly drowned in the pool there. She said her frequent contact with horses was what gave her the confidence to try to ride U-Dandy. She compared the experience of riding U-Dandy to the excitement she felt the time she thought she saw the Bear Lake Monster on a family trip to Bear Lake.

She said the picture she took of U-Dandy and her father, featured in an earlier blog post, was taken with a Brownie camera given to her by her school friend Peter Brunson. She would frequently bring her parents up to the barn "Just so they could see this wonderful horse I loved. And in my heart, I thought, if they get to know him enough, I’ll be able to bring him home. And there is still, as you turn into University Hill Way, there is still a small orchard there. It has maybe four ancient trees. Well, in my mind, U-Dandy could live there, and I would, there is a little gray garage that’s there that we have, and I just, I just knew that if things were right and everybody got along, he could come. And it never happened." She also at one point tried to convince her parents to buy a horse from the circus that came and performed in the old stadium, which once stood across from the barn.

Ms. Crockett has many other fond memories of growing up around USU, including playing house in the student union building, buying hamburgers with her friends at the Bluebird on campus, and meeting jazz musician Duke Ellington when he performed at USU. She came to USU as a student after the horse barn had been transformed into the Art Barn. ". . . I went back to take a pottery class there, and I remember thinking . . . right there is where U-Dandy was. And it was, it was pretty nice. I kind of thought, well, I bet he's still here sort of. It was neat."

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."

Ghosts of the Art Barn

All college campuses have ghost stories, and Utah State University is no exception. There may even be a ghost or two haunting the Art Barn. John Seiter, a USU speech communication professor who once taught in the Art Barn, remembers that a number of his students said there was a ghost in the barn. In fact, some of his students decided that the Art Barn was haunted by a ghost pig. He explains how this story came to be:

"Antonio [a large ceramic pig from San Antonio that Dr. Seiter keeps in his office] ended up being in the barn, and it's the best conversation piece for a professor, especially a professor whose office is in the barn . . . My students joked that there was a ghost in the barn, and of course a lot of things started being attributed to this. It started as a ghost, and it ended up as a pig ghost . . . For a while they were blaming it on my pig, and then it went from my pig to it's an actual ghost pig. And they had a name for it; it wasn't Antonio. I can't remember what the name was, but, you know that banging [the building had steam heat] that happens at odd times when you're in class? Sometimes you're teaching and the banging would start and the students would go 'It's the ghost pig.'"

Dr. Seiter said that some of his students also thought that on rainy days the Art Barn still smelled like hay from its horse barn days.

What do you think? Is the Art Barn haunted? If you know any spooky (or funny) legends or stories about the barn, post a comment and let us know!