Frat Row
“Frat Row” was a staple of the University’s Greek Life. The houses at 401, 395, 389, 387, 385 North Pleasant Street and the Theta Chi and Phi Sig fraternity houses became what the students coined “Frat Row.” To the students, Frat Row was known as the place to be on the weekends. To the administration, Frat Row was a constant reminder of the “zoomass” party image attached to the university.
In 1885, the strip of North Pleasant Street that came to be known as Frat Row was owned by a small private school named Mount Pleasant Seminary. The school owned all of the land between East Pleasant Street and North Pleasant Street. But shortly after the Civil War, the Seminary went out of business and put the strips of land up for sale.
In the 1890s and through 1905, professors from the Massachusetts Agricultural College bought land from the seminary in order to build houses for their own personal use. The resulting five houses were constantly used for small amounts of time in the year and with the downward spiral of the economy during The Great Depression, the professors who owned the land decided to rent out the five houses to fraternities and sororities. This was the beginning of Frat Row.
Alpha Tau Gamma (ATG), one of the original fraternities that rented from the professors, established themselves as a non-profit corporation in the late 1930s. In the beginning of 1940, ATG bought 375 North Pleasant Street from the professors and began renting it out to fraternities and sororities of their own choosing. In 1969, ATG bought 387 North Pleasant Street. In 1970, ATG bought their third house at 401 North Pleasant Street. In 1976, ATG took their investment even further and bought the strip of land that connected 386 North Pleasant to 401, which solidified the stretch of land as Frat Row. To further their dominance over North Pleasant Street, ATG bought houses 389 and 395 in the years 1985 and 1987.
Throughout the years, the administration became more and more frustrated with Frat Row and the constant chaos that occurred on the property on the weekends. Over and over again the administration tried to find ways to demolish the buildings, but every attempt failed. All of the houses were at least 80 years old and were grandfathered in before a zoning bylaw banned houses in that area. The only way for the administration to get rid of Frat Row was to negotiate buying the houses from ATG.
The houses became more and more vacant between semesters, and in the early 2000s ATG began negotiations to sell the properties to the university. In 2006, ATG finally settled with the administration to sell all of their property for 2.5 million dollars. The deal went through, and in 2006, the university demolished the empty houses at 375, 387, 389, 395, and 401 North Pleasant Street.
As for ATG, the fraternity donated $500,001 of the money they received from the sale to the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at UMass to establish an endowed professorship for the position of the director of the school. The professorship is called the ATG Fred. P Jeffery Chair, which is named after the school’s former director who passed away in 1997.
UMass Special Collections and University Archives
Marshall Annex
<p>The Marshall Annex was an ever-changing fixture of the UMass campus for many years before it was eventually demolished in 2006. Originally, the building stood as a barracks building at Westover Field, an Air Force base in Chicopee, Massachusetts. The barracks were built as temporary structures for the newly established base in 1940. After World War II, however, the base no longer saw the need for the temporary barracks, and tore them down. Simultaneously, UMass was experiencing a dramatic increase in enrollment due to the influx of veterans returning home. Therefore, in 1947 one of the demolished barracks was transported to the UMass campus and reassembled on North Pleasant Street to serve as additional lab space for Marshall Hall. Much like its original purpose as an Air Force barracks, the Annex was only meant to provide temporary space for classes until permanent structures could be built. However, the make-shift Marshall Annex stood for 59 years after it was first delivered to campus. It was originally used as a lab station, and later on served as an art building; home to metal-working, wood, and art studios. The images show a view of the exterior of the Annex, and an oil painting of the interior of Marshall Annex when it was used as studio and classroom space. Pang-Chieh Hsu, an MFA student in the UMass art department finished his painting <em>Plaster Classroom</em> in 2002.</p>
<p>While many students and professors harbored an affection for the quirky, historic building, there was some resentment over the dilapidated nature of Marshall Annex. John Townsend, an art professor who worked in the building, complained that an experiment on quails once performed in the Annex left the building “smelling like a chicken coop” for ten years. The bitterness came to a head when the building’s neighbor, the Foundry Building, was destroyed in a fire in 2003. Like the Marshall Annex, the Foundry Building was used for welding and metal-work, and was also a dry, wooden structure with only local alarms and no sprinkler system. Art professors and students began to fear that a similar disaster could happen in the Marshall Annex, creating a demand for modern facilities for the Art Department. Norman Philips, a retired art professor, stated: “The Art Department was always clamoring for a new building. I think it’s obvious the Art Department got the dregs.”</p>
<p>Indeed, by the early 2000’s the Marshall Annex was in rough repair. The building was scheduled to be torn down in 2002 after an electrical fire, however the Art Department requested a delay in the demolition until another location could be found for the art and metal studios. Instead, the university sent a contractor to update the antique wiring. Though much of the wiring was brought up to code, wiring in some classrooms remained unmodified. Soon after, however, a new art building was finally promised to the department. This building was named the Studio Arts Building and was completed in 2008.</p>
<p>On September 6, 2006 the Marshall Annex was at last demolished. Ironically, though the Art Department had been advocating for a new building for years, the university tore the building down to make way for the 114.5 million dollar Integrated Sciences Building included under the same plan as the Studio Arts Building. However, just as the Air Force barracks was reborn as the Marshall Annex, the building was given new life in the Integrated Sciences Building. The contractors were able to recycle 100% of the steel from the Marshall Annex in the construction of the Integrated Sciences Building, which still stands on North Pleasant Street as a subtle homage to the old barracks and the Marshall Annex.</p>
UMass Special Collections and University Archives
"After 59 Years, Marshall Annex Demolished." In the Loop, News for Staff & Faculty. September 7, 2006. http://web.archive.org/web/20080609064336/http://www.umass.edu/loop/lookingback/articles/38479.php.
Hsu, Pang-Chieg, Plaster Classroom, oil on panel, 24" x 23," 2002. http://www.umassmag.com/postcards/postcardw2k3_ad.html
Waiting Station
Arthur Sharp, University of Massachusetts graduate, designed a waiting station which serviced people in transit for over one hundred years. Completed in 1911 as the Massachusetts Agricultural College trolley station and shelter, the one-story structure opened onto North Pleasant Street, where electric tracks ran from Sunderland to Northampton. Trolley service declined then disappeared in the following decades, and the shelter was eventually adopted by the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority as a bus stop. Later accompanied by a modern Plexiglass bus shelter, the waiting station was demolished in May of 2012. The building’s hundred years at UMass tell a story of the university and of the fast-changing modes of transit that have served its students, faculty, and staff.
The first electric trolley through Amherst, Massachusetts was boarded on June 16, 1897. Originally called the Amherst and Sunderland Street Railway, the line was connected to Northampton in 1900 and eventually sold to the Holyoke Street Railway in 1907. The trolley tracks ran down North Pleasant Street, through the university campus. UMass – then, the Massachusetts Agricultural College – graduate Sharp finished his degree in landscape gardening in 1910 and went on to design a building for the campus trolley station. Stylistically, the structure was based in the new American Craftsman style. It was simultaneously influenced by Japanese styles of architecture; the Massachusetts Agricultural College had a sister school in the Imperial College of Architecture, Sapporo, a relationship begun in the 1870s. Also reminiscent of Italianate buildings, the waiting station – of brick and cement, with asphalt shingles – served as a gateway to campus when first built. On its outskirts, the station was a visitor’s first stop at the Massachusetts Agricultural College.
Sharp’s waiting station first appeared on a campus map in 1919. A 1931 map showed the station as well as the tracks themselves, but by 1935 the trolley tracks were no longer included. The last trolley tracks were removed from North Pleasant Street during the 1950s; a 1959 campus map did not list the waiting station, nor indicate its footprint. Nearly one-hundred years after the shelter’s construction, a new academic building was sited for the intersection where the waiting station sat. During the early months of 2012, local preservation groups worked to delay the station’s imminent removal. An appeals process was made mandatory prior to the demolition, but the construction firm responsible for the work did not await approval and demolished the waiting station without proper authorization. The shelter survived a century on a changing campus; first constructed at the edge of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, the waiting station spent its final years at the center of a much-larger University of Massachusetts.
UMass Special Collections and University Archives
RG150-0005670, RG150-0006014, RG150-0006140
Practice House (now part of the University Club)
150 years after the Massachusetts Agricultural College acquired the Cowles’ house in 1864, the building still stands on what is now the University of Massachusetts at Amherst campus. Much has been changed, however, in the three centuries since its construction as a colonial New England farmhouse. Oliver Cowles settled in Amherst during the early 18th-century, and built a farmhouse for his family around 1731. Just over a century later, this home and the surrounding property was sold by the Cowles descendants to the state of Massachusetts. Both became part of the new Massachusetts Agricultural College, a land-grant institution whose original focus was experimental farming, where it was eventually put to use as a Practice House for the Home Economics Departement.
Starting in 1864, the Cowles house served as residence for the farmer in charge of MAC’s experimental program. The structure remained much the same during these years. An Italianate-style porch was added then removed between 1900 and 1930, but the Cowles’ home – eventually known as the Homestead – otherwise maintained its 18th-century appearance. In 1929, as the country sunk into economic depression, the Massachusetts Agricultural College realized a need to expand its mission as the nation and the world became increasingly more industrialized. Just two years later, in 1931, the institution renamed itself the Massachusetts State College – a clear symbol of change.
With this expansion came an experimental major in home economics. Women had been attending MAC since the late 1800s, but this program of practical homemaking was new to the Depression era. Just before the crash, in early October of 1929, a Springfield Republican article announced the opening of a “Practice House, Where Students Learn Fine Points of Household Economics” at the Massachusetts Agricultural College. The Cowles’ home was updated in a Colonial-revival style and became the Practice House, where, supervised by a faculty mentor, groups of female students lived together and learned how to keep house on a moderate budget. The Republican article recognized that this sort of program already existed at similar New England institutions, but the experimental nature of the system was well aligned with the philosophy of the original Massachusetts Agricultural College. A similar program remained in place in the Homestead for almost fifty years.
Groups of women lived in the Homestead until 1964, and the building was used by the Home Economics Department until 1972. The Lederle Graduate Research Center was planned for the site of Oliver Cowles’ home in the early 1970s, and the 1730s farmhouse would necessarily be displaced. Rather than demolition, however, the University of Massachusetts chose to relocate the Homestead beside the Boltwood-Stockbridge house, which was serving as the University Club and Restaurant. The Boltwood-Stockbridge house was the oldest in Amherst, a 1728 farmhouse which had also been owned by a member of the extended Cowles family. Like the Cowles’, it had been sold to the Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1864 but has remained on its original site. The two buildings were attached by a modern structure and combined to serve staff, faculty, and alumni of the University of Massachusetts. The story of the Cowles’ house, the Homestead, or the Practice House, is both a story of positive preservation on the UMass campus, and one that speaks to the ever-changing nature of the landscape of a growing university. The Home Economics major no longer exists at UMass. It has perhaps evolved in the Department of Nutrition, but these students – male and female – certainly do not live and work together in a colonial Amherst farmhouse, as those early classes did.
UMass Special Collections and University Archives
RG150-0003323, RG150-0003321, RG150-0004573, RG150-0004557
Marshall Hall
<p>Construction on Marshall Hall at the University of Massachusetts, then called the Massachusetts State College, began in 1915 and was completed in 1916. Built on the west side of what is now Thatcher Road, the building was designed to house the microbiology department. Known simply as the Microbiology Laboratory until it was renamed twenty years later, the structure’s three floors, contained the Microbiology Department’s academic offices, classrooms, and research laboratories.</p>
<p>Two decades after it was built, the university renamed the first space on campus dedicated to the study and research of microbiology after a man who had provided leadership for department. The Microbiology Laboratory was renamed Marshall Hall in 1935 after former professor of microbiology, Dr. Charles Edward Marshall, who had passed away in 1927. Dr. Marshall had also served the university as the first head of department of Bacteriology, director of the graduate school, and the director of the experiment station. His views on the purpose of the study of microbiology also fit in well at Massachusetts State College: in his 1911 book, <em>Microbiology: A Text-book of Microorganisms, General and Applied</em>, he urged microbiologists not to simply describe how microbiology can be useful to other disciplines, but to infiltrate other programs, especially agricultural and domestic science programs.</p>
<p>As the school began to expand after World War II, so did the microbiology department. In 1947, the Marshall Annex was built for additional research space, specifically for the Microbiology Department. Marshall Hall was demolished in 1996, followed by the Marshall Annex ten years later to make way for new construction. The new Integrated Science and Laboratory Science buildings now stand in the place of Marshall Hall and Marshall Annex. Though Marshall Hall is no longer extant, its story plays an important role in the history and expansion of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.</p>
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UMass Special Collections and University Archives
RG150-0003346, RG150-0003347, RG150-0003348
Abigail Adams House
The Abigail Adams House was built in 1920 as the first dormitory intended to house female students at UMass Amherst, (then the Massachusetts Agricultural College).
When UMass began in 1863 as a land-grant agricultural college, women were not allowed to attend the school. Forty years later, the first female student enrolled. In 1917 the thirty female students enrolled in the Massachusetts Agricultural College lived in fraternity houses that the college leased for them, but due to rising enrollment after WWI, President Butterfield asked the college to look for a better housing solution.
In June 1919, the school received funds from the state and began constructing a dormitory for female students. In the spring of 1920, the college initiated a contest to name the new dormitory. Open to alumnae and former female students of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, as well as all high school girls and members of the junior Home Economics club in Massachusetts, the contest stipulated that the name must be a Massachusetts woman involved in agriculture and country life.
Though Katherine B. Ehenes, a fourteen year old from Medfield, Massachusetts, was one among four who suggested the college name the new dorm after Abigail Adams, she was chosen as the winner because of her detailed description of Adams as “the first farmerette of Braintree and Massachusetts.”
The Abigail Adams House was officially dedicated in October 1920, and the college held a conference on women in agriculture and country life in celebration of the occasion. Built on the west side of North Pleasant Street, the Abigail Adams House stood three and a half stories high, and was constructed in Georgian-revival style.
Often called the Abbey, the dormitory housed 98 students at $75 per room. The building functioned as a dorm until 1962 when it was ravaged by fire. After some renovations, the building was used for faculty offices until 1967 when it was demolished to make space for the Lederle Graduate Research Center.
UMass Special Collections and University Archives
RG150-0003150, RG150-0003710, RG150-0003711, RG150-0003712, RG150-0003720