Guilford College - Quaker Yearbook (Greensboro, NC)

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of the Academic Dean ' s offices into newly renovated quarters on tlie first lloor of the gymnasium. No tragedy emptied Cox, thougli. It was being renovated, end wings and inner walls re- moved to create studio space for a new art buildmg. Cox, Mary Hobbs and Archdale had all been born of a set of circumstances at once similar to and different from those that changed them during 1976-77. In order to trace the story and to isolate the ironies one must be aware of anotlier fire at Guilford College and of another housing shortage. The two students in the photograph (opposite) stand before one of the first of a group of handbuilt cottages that were once located near the present baseball diamond. The first of these Boys Cottages , as they were officially known, had been pieced together beneath a porch roof scavenged before fire destroyed the first King Hall in 1885. Records show that six cottages and a common dining room eventually comprised the cottage system, more commonly known as Shack Row. However, no one seems to have recorded the number of young Guilford men who survived tlieir College years there. Shack Row persisted in physical fact until the completion of Cox Hall in 1 91 8. By that time it had evolved into a system of co-operative living, by means of which the residents reduced ex- penses by providing food for themselves and muscle for house- keeping and maintenance chores. Tlie college provided a woman to cook since, as Dorothy Gilbert Tliorne relates, it could not be assured that in every group of boys there was one with cuhnary experience . The co-operafive living system that grew up in Shack Row pass- ed across the campus to become incarnate first in a set of Girls Cottages . The dormitory for women that replaced them in 1907, is now named after the woman whose labors and dreams made it possible, Mary Mendenliall Hobbs.

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The Fire This Time It was the sort of year whose ironies were subtle, tleetiiiglike the play of sunlight on the dewy grass of fall mornings; they were there if you cared to look for them but they evaporated in the distraction of a busy day. Unless such things haunt you. your awareness is free of them after the few moments m which they come to life, glisten and then fade. Few students had access to the knowledge needed to place the year in ironic perspective. For them it began in an even greater than usual confusion with overflowing dormitories, students living m rooms that had been study lounges and even in the Frazier Apartments and Dana Houses that had previously been reserved for married students and faculty members. Before the first semester ended tlic apartments would also hold the population of Mary Hobbs Hall, forced to vacate then huild- ing alter an arsonist ' s fire destroyed the attic. Cox Hall had also been vacated, the faculty offices the build- ing had housed were shuffled into space created by the transfer

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By that time the institution which had begun in 1834 as New Garden Boarding Scliool had become Guilford College. But in 1885 it was still Friend ' s School in North Carolina and faced the task of replacing what had been one of the only two school build- ings. The response was ambitious; they carried the bricks from the first King Hall down the lull towards the front of campus and shaped them into a new building. Later officially named Archdale. they first called it Phoenix Hall because it had arisen from the ashes. Another King Hall was built to serve dual duty as a library and classroom building only to he again demolished by fire m 1 08. Of the several fires that Guilford has endured those that erupt- ed this year were the most difficult to fathom. The fire m Mary Hobbs attic was the first and most damaging of six arsonist ' s blazes discovered in the early winter of 1976. But Mary Hobbs Hall had already, that year faced and overconn another danger which would have ended the tradition begun in Shack Row. College officials feared that Hobb ' s would have to go the way of Archdale-to be condemned as living quarters and converted to office space, turned out to the academic pasture of faculty office buildings. They decided instead that the spirit ol ' co-operation that Hohbs embodies should be preserved in a re- novated form. A new roof was installed early this summer. The dorm win- dows are gone now. What remains, fortunately is the spirit of in- dividual effort and communal enterprise that began nearly a 100 years ago when two Guilford students carried an abandoned porch roof down the hill to a stand of wliite oaks.