Morrill Hall (University of Maryland)

Morrill Hall went up in 1898 as Science Hall, on the knoll that the first students of the Maryland Agricultural College nicknamed the Acropolis, and it is the oldest academic building still in use at the University of Maryland. On the night of 29 November 1912 a fire that began during an impromptu Thanksgiving dance destroyed the Barracks and the Administration Building along with every dormitory and most of the college's records; firemen, students and neighbours worked through the night to save the buildings that stood nearby, this one among them, and nobody was hurt or killed. What people report here is oddly precise, and most of it happens outdoors: the sound of marching feet on the old drill field, where cadets of a compulsory military programme once shouldered their rifles for hours to work off demerits, and the smell of smoke indoors where there is no fire. The university publishes the legend and its explanation on the same page — in 2005 it recorded that drilling for a new air conditioner had released fumes and ash left over from the 1912 fire — and its own archives note that nobody is known to have died here.

The building now called Morrill Hall stands on the highest ground of what was once a farm — a knoll at the head of College Avenue that the first generations of students nicknamed "the Acropolis". Charles Benedict Calvert sold that land, 420 acres of his Riversdale plantation, to the investors of the Maryland Agricultural College by a deed dated 28 April 1858 and recorded at Upper Marlboro. On 6 October 1859 the campus was dedicated and the first thirty-four students began classes. What kept the college alive through its bankrupt years was a piece of federal legislation: Lincoln signed Justin Morrill's Land Grant Act in July 1862, and in February 1864 the Maryland legislature voted to accept the Morrill grant. The act carried a condition that shaped the ground outside this particular building for the next sixty years — military training was compulsory. The students were organised into a corps of cadets divided into companies, each with its own commander, and part of the drill field they used lay immediately outside the future Morrill Hall. That field was also where punishment was served: a cadet who collected demerits had to shoulder his rifle and march back and forth across it for hours to work them off. The Civil War reached these grounds twice, both times in 1864 and both times without a shot fired. On 24 April 1864 General Ambrose Burnside and six thousand men of the Union's Ninth Army Corps camped on the college land on their way to reinforce Grant in Virginia. On 11 July 1864, as part of Jubal Early's Confederate raid on Washington, General Bradley T. Johnson and four hundred men spent the night there, Johnson using the Rossborough Inn as his headquarters. The University Archives is explicit about what did not happen: "we have no record of soldiers dying on campus". The building itself belongs to a later and far duller boom. The Hatch Act of 1887 brought an agricultural experiment station and $15,000 a year; between 1887 and 1892 the college budget rose roughly 500 per cent, paying for new buildings, more faculty and more students. Science Hall — the name it was given at the start — went up in 1898 and cost, according to the university's own timeline, "about $24,000". It is a three-storey brick block, seven bays wide and six deep, in a Second Empire style already going out of fashion elsewhere: a straight-sided mansard roof in square-butt and fishscale slate, pedimented dormers on every elevation, and a four-storey entry tower over a double-leaf nine-light door set in a semicircular brick arch. The attribution of the design to Henry B. McDonnell that circulates online rests on a single citation to the Arcadia local history College Park (Stullich and Bryant, 2005), which I have not been able to consult; the state's own inventory form of 2007 leaves the architect blank and, more awkwardly, records that a date stone on the southeast corner gives a construction date of about 1892 — six years earlier than every other source. The disagreement has a plausible cause, and it is the same event that gave the building its ghost story: the college's records burned. They burned on the night of Friday 29 November 1912. Around forty cadets had stayed on campus over the Thanksgiving weekend and had arranged an impromptu dance on the first floor of the Administration Building. At about 10:30 p.m. the Cadet Major was told that a blaze had started high in the same building, between the third and fourth floors. The cadets escorted their dates out and went back in, some carrying out documents and furniture, others throwing their possessions from the windows. The Hyattsville fire brigade fought a stiff wind until the campus water supply ran out; equipment sent by train from Washington sat unloaded at the College Park station. By morning the Barracks and the Administration Building — the two largest buildings on campus, standing where LeFrak Hall and the South Campus Dining Hall are now — were a total loss. Newspaper reports put the damage at $150,000; the university's own timeline later appraised it at $250,000. Every dormitory, half the classrooms and offices and most of the college records were gone. Nobody was hurt and nobody died. Firemen, students and neighbours worked through the night to save the buildings that stood nearby, Science Hall among them — it was not spared by luck alone. President Richard W. Silvester, in office since 1892, resigned shortly afterwards, described in the yearbook as "broken-hearted". The surviving building was renamed at some point for Justin Smith Morrill; none of the sources consulted here gives the year. It went on to house, in turn, agriculture and horticulture (c. 1912), entomology, zoology and language and literature (c. 1918), the School of Liberal Arts (c. 1919), and vegetable pathology, veterinary science, civil engineering and psychology (c. 1966). Today Building 040 is 16,277 gross square feet of general-purpose academic space shared by units of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences: the Maryland Population Research Center, the Office of Academic Computing Services, economics, criminology and criminal justice, and hearing and speech sciences.

Morrill Hall is not a museum and there is nothing to buy. It is Building 040 of the University of Maryland, an ordinary working academic building of 16,277 gross square feet, on Morrill Quad east of Preinkert Drive on the south side of the College Park campus. The interior is offices, teaching space and research rooms belonging to units of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences — the Maryland Population Research Center, the Office of Academic Computing Services, economics, criminology and criminal justice, and hearing and speech sciences. There are no evening openings, no tours of the building and no basement access: the paranormal team that spent two nights inside in May 2012 needed the university's Film Office, its Public Safety staff and the University Historian to arrange it. Treat the corridors as what they are, someone's place of work during business hours. What you can see freely, at any hour, is the outside. The 2009 marker erected by the university is mounted on the wall to the right of the main east door and can be read from the steps; the four-storey entry tower, the mansard roof in fishscale slate and the pedimented dormers are all original. The quadrangle in front — the old drill field where the marching feet are reported — was planted as an arboretum with the senior gift of the Class of 2009. The two buildings that burned in 1912 stood on the site now occupied by LeFrak Hall and the South Campus Dining Hall, a short walk away, and the Rossborough Inn, the campus building that genuinely dates from the Civil War, is on the far side of the campus on Baltimore Avenue. The campus is open and served by the College Park–U of Md Metro station. The University Archives publishes a free online ghost tour of the campus; there is no paid ghost attraction here and never has been.