Art Barn "Turf Wars"

Barn research team member Jason Neil shared some of his discoveries in the USU archives:

"Today while I was at the special collections, Bob Parson told me that he had come across some Art Barn documents that I might find interesting. I looked through several folders and discovered quite a few documents of interest. It seems that when the Art Department shifted to the new art building, there were quite a few departments debating and asking for the space."

Among the documents he examined were letters showing several departments jockeying for space in the Art Barn, including the Art Department (which wanted to keep the kilns on the first floor for commercial ceramics production and community ceramics classes), the College of Natural Resources (which wanted a wet lab on the south end of the second floor, where plumbing and a concrete floor were available, and offices on the third floor, as well as proposing that some of the space might also be used for MX missile research), and the Department of Languages, Philosophy and Speech Communication. He also found architectural drawings of the first two floors of the Art Barn showing how the space was eventually divided between the departments, which are included below (these drawings give an incorrect date for the original building of the Art Barn).

Jason also said, "One thing which I could not copy due to size but which I thought was interesting were two architectural drawings (fairly large size) of a proposed Music Hall from 1952. Apparently the university was proposing, planning, or toying with the idea of transforming the horse barn into a Music Hall and musical instruction facility. From the date it is possible that this idea formulated well before the university even thought of the Art Barn."

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.

Delighted That It's Still There

Debora Seiter’s husband John is a speech communications professor whose office was in the Art Barn before the upper floors of the building were condemned. The Art Barn is a special place for her and her family as well as for her husband. Her uncle is a World War II veteran who had attended USU through the GI Bill. She and her husband brought him up to visit the campus again, and “he just really honed in on the barn,” which, along with Old Main, is one of the few landmarks remaining from over 60 years ago. It “thoroughly delighted him that it was still there.”

She also recalls when professors started leaving the Art Barn for offices elsewhere on campus:

“I remember feeling like, well gosh, this isn't going to be the same, and honestly it hasn't. People have kind of branched out and made new connections and networking. . . But as far as recreating as a group and being able to bounce from office to office, still in your chair rolling around, or being able to have a snake, or whatever, those times were over.”

Luckily, memories of the barn will continue to be preserved as it takes on its new role as a museum and welcome center.

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!