University of Delaware
Office of Public Relations
The Messenger
Vol. 6, No. 1/1996
Recognition: A Special Report
University of Delaware Mall: A Place of Grace and Beauty
by Carol Hoffecker, Richards Professor of History

     We are witnesses to the fulfillment of a dream that had its
beginnings over 80 years ago. In 1915, there was no University of
Delaware...
     There were two small, single-sex colleges under the aegis of
one board of trustees: Delaware College, with an enrollment of
about 225 male students, was centered at Old College on a campus
constricted by the tracks of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and
Main Street, and the Women's College of Delaware, then in its
first year, was located on a separate campus near the corner of
South College Avenue and Park Place. The half-mile strip that
separated these two institutions was known as "no man's land." It
was mainly agricultural and included peach and apple orchards,
some marshy lowland, a few scattered houses and an old tavern.
     But, a renaissance was under way. Hugh Rodney Sharp, a
Delaware College graduate recently appointed to the board of
trustees, believed that his alma mater had the potential to
achieve greatness, and he enlisted the support of his brother-in-law, 
Pierre S. du Pont, to help realize his vision. In 1915, du Pont 
anonymously purchased "no man's land" for the college. Sharp and 
President Samuel Chiles Mitchell then moved quickly to hire the 
nation's most distinguished architects of collegiate structures, 
Frank Miles Day and his partner, Charles Z. Klauder, to provide 
a development plan for the newly acquired land.
     Day and Klauder had earned their reputation by designing
buildings in the then-popular Gothic style for such prestigious
clients as Princeton, Yale, Cornell and the University of
Pennsylvania. But, the architects proved equally at home in the
colonial Georgian idiom that Rodney Sharp thought suitable for
the First State. Rodney Sharp loved Delaware's rich architectural
heritage. Throughout the state, venerable buildings of brick and
wood recalled their 18th-century builders' respect for classical
antiquity and its supreme virtues of symmetry, proportion and
balance. At Sharp's suggestion, Frank Miles Day traveled
Delaware's dusty roads to make notes on architectural design
motifs that he would later incorporate into buildings along this
Mall.
     The most important first step in the transformation of "no
man's land" was not the design of any particular building, but
rather the design of the new campus itself. Drawing on the
concepts of symmetry and balance so dear to the 18th century,
especially as they had been so elegantly and impressively
realized in Thomas Jefferson's design for the Lawn at the
University of Virginia, Frank Day conceived of the plan for a
Mall-originally to be called "The Green" -to begin at Main Street
and converge on a large central building that would be capped by
a massive rotunda. The Mall was to extend beyond the central
building to unite the men's campus with the women's campus.
Today, you see before you the Day and Klauder plan of 1917, only
slightly revised in this version of 1928, which is remarkably
like the finished product. With the construction of Gore Hall,
the planners' concept will finally be realized in its entirety.
Once the layout of the Mall had been defined, construction could
begin. Within a year of the land purchase, the first two
structures were under way, both financed by P.S. duPont and named
for Rodney Sharp's favorite teachers: Harter Hall, a dormitory
and Wolf Hall, which was to house science
laboratories and an auditorium. When the construction of these
buildings was completed in 1917, students helped to plant the
rows of elm trees along the Mall, many of which, in defiance of
Dutch elm disease, continue to define the Mall today, their
overarching branches providing shade in summer and a graceful,
yet rugged, beauty in all seasons. A photograph taken at the time
shows the young trees, their tops hardly higher than the first
floor of Wolf Hall.
     In 1918, at Rodney Sharp's suggestion, the board hired
Marian Cruger Coffin to provide a landscape plan for the entire
campus. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Marian Coffin was among America's outstanding landscape
architects and the Mall that we see before us today represents
the ideas and aesthetics that guided her, Frank Miles Day and
their patron, Rodney Sharp.
     At the beginning of the 1920s, the coordinate colleges were
joined in name as the University of Delaware, a development that
reinforced the way the Mall had linked the two colleges
spatially. The first building constructed for the use of students
of both Delaware College and the Women's College was the Memorial
Library, dedicated in 1924 to honor those Delawareans who gave
their lives in the First World War. It was fitting that this
unifying structure was chosen to occupy the central position on
the Mall. The building was financed by small gifts from
Delawareans, including school children, capped by a substantial
donation from Rodney Sharp. In the late 1920s, two buildings were
designed to face one another to define the cross-axis of the
Mall. For that purpose, they were recessed from other existing 
and proposed structures along the Mall. These buildings were 
Mitchell Hall, the University's first auditorium for the performing 
arts, dedicated in 1930, another gift from Rodney Sharp, and Evans
Hall, its partner across the Mall, built by the state to serve as
classrooms and laboratories for the school of engineering.
     In the Depression decade that followed, the University was
fortunate to find a new benefactor whose gifts made it possible
to continue developing the Mall. Harry Fletcher Brown, a Harvard-
educated executive at the Du Pont Company, was devoted to
improving educational opportunities for Delawareans. In 1937,
Brown financed the construction of the chemistry laboratory that
now bears his name. The following year, he provided the matching
funds, which, together with federal support from the Public Works
Administration, financed the construction of the building's twin,
now called Hullihen Hall, which was designated to house the
central administration and the humanities departments. These two
buildings, notable for the distinctive oval indentations on their
facades that have been painted white for emphasis, were connected
to the Memorial Library by archways. These additions, designed by
Charles Z. Klauder, harmoniously completed a major focal point in
the Mall's overall design.
     Although the post World War II period was one of dramatic
growth at the University, it was not until 1958 that the Mall saw
its next addition. Du Pont Hall, financed by the Good Samaritan
and Longwood foundations for the College of Engineering,
acknowledged the many gifts that P.S. du Pont had provided to the
University during his lifetime. In 1962, the state provided the
funds to construct Sharp Laboratory, which honors another
magnificent friend to the University, to house the Department of
Physics and Astronomy.
     One third of a century has passed since that last addition
to the portion of the Mall that lies between Memorial Hall and
Delaware Avenue. During that time, University students, faculty
and administrators have hoped for the opportunity to complete
this most central part of the Mall in the way envisioned by those
early planners. We have long been in need of
additional classrooms that such a building can provide, and we
dared to hope that we might build a structure of outstanding
architectural merit to complete the dream that Rodney Sharp
envisaged for this University.
     If he, together with P.S. du Pont, H. Fletcher Brown,
architects Frank Miles Day and Charles Z. Klauder, landscape
designer Marian Coffin, and presidents Samuel Chiles Mitchell and
Walter Hullihen could be here today, they would surely rejoice
with us that the Gore family has come forward to complete the
task they so ably and so ambitiously began eight decades ago.