WORKSHOP

Originally built at what is now west wing of Laboratory of Mechanics. Subsequently moved about 50-60 feet north.

President Welch expressed the need “to build a work shop large enough for the accomodation of students who take the course in Mechanic Arts. I hazard nothing in saying that with such a shop together with a competent instructor and foreman the young men could do all the carpenter and joiner work needed on the farm, even to the finishing of dwelling houses and other necessary buildings.”¹ At the same time he asked for an appropriation of $5,000 for the Workshop.

Funds were granted and in May 1870 the Board instructed the building committee to proceed at once with construction.

The building was described in the 4th Biennial Report (1870-71):

A frame workshop 30 x 30 feet, two stories high, with an engine house containing two laundry rooms 27 x 23 ½ feet, also two storied, with a brick smoke-stack fifty feet high and necessary fixtures, was erected under the direction of the committee, at a cost of five thousand dollars.

When the workshop was moved in 1885 the laundry room wing was torn down and rebuilt. The functions of the building were set forth in the 13th Biennial Report (1888-89):

The carpenter and pattern shop is a two-story building 30 feet by 50 feet with a wing 24 feet by 32 feet, containing the Corliss Engine, condenser, and air-pump, feed-pump, etc. The lower floor is used for the wood-working machines, the second story for tool room and benches at which carpentering is taught. The equipment consists of seven wood-turning lathes, one pony planer, one mortising machine, one Fay rip and cross-cut circular saw, one jigsaw, one 3 foot grindstone, twelve sets of small tools in the toolroom, also seventy-five tool lockers.

An 1894 map shows an odd shaped building. Apparently various lean-to sheds or other increments had been added to the building over the years, but these are not otherwise recorded.

By 1893, when funds were being requested for a new building, the old shop was described:

Our present building for shop work in carpentry and manual training is quite deficient and inefficient. It is an antiquated wooden building, poorly lighted, too small for our classes, and so constructed that we cannot heat it comfortably in cold weather. It is not capable of making a good stable, let alone being a building for the education of young men in the important skill and industry of the hand in the preparation and uses of wood.²

The Workshop served the college well, both for instruction and for what can be thought of as the original Physical Plant Department. It was razed in 1898 after completion of the new Foundry and the new Carpenter Shop that year.