| Henry Mall Historic District | |
| Added: | January 22, 1992 |
| Refnum: | 91001986 |
The Henry Mall Historic District is a landscaped mall and the surrounding academic agriculture buildings on the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus, roughly laid out by architects Warren Laird and Paul Cret from 1906 to 1908, with buildings constructed from 1903 to 1961.[1] In 1992 the district was added to the National Register of Historic Places.[2] [3]
The University of Wisconsin was created on paper in 1848, the same year that Wisconsin became a state. In 1850, before any building, a UW architect envisioned a mall running down the hill that would later be called Bascom Hill. The UW's oldest building, North Hall was built in 1851 near the top of that mall, and for fifty years most of the UW's construction was along the Bascom Hill mall.[4]
The UW curriculum initially focused on geography, English grammar, Latin and Greek.[5] Chancellor Lathrop endorsed agricultural education already in 1851, but the state legislature didn't fund it. In 1857 Michigan did start a college of agriculture, and Iowa followed in 1858. After the Morrill Act of 1862 opened the possibility of land-grant funding, the legislature in 1866 expanded the UW's charge to include industrial and agricultural education and created a professorship of agriculture and chemistry. The Regents bought a 195-acre farm on what was then the west side of campus, where "agriculture is to be practically taught by experimenting on different soils and location of the land..." (That farm on the west end of campus is now very citified - the site of many of the UW's ag buildings.) A school of agriculture was established in 1868 with a three-year degree, but the courses were mostly general science courses, and students were few.[1]
Finally in 1880 a professorship was created devoted solely to agriculture, and William A. Henry was appointed. "A man of great energy, a vigorous correspondent, an active and effective publicist, Henry worked closely with the farm leaders of Wisconsin and the farmer's associations, seeking to find out what the farmers wanted from the department and trying to devise the means of giving it to them." Henry procured the first grant from the legislature to study a new agricultural venture - the cultivation of various kinds of sugar cane and manufacture of syrup and sugar from it. He got another grant to fund the university farm, which was renamed the Experiment Station. Under Henry's guidance, the UW began offering two-day farmer's institutes, which discussed the best agricultural practices with farmers, and in 1886 started the 12-week winter short course for farmers - a new idea that hadn't been tried elsewhere. More practical research was done by the Ag department, including exploration of round silos, barn ventilation, soil problems, use of insecticides, development of plum varieties for Wisconsin's climate, the effects of different feeds (including the new silage) on animal growth and milk production, Professor Stephen Babcock's standardized butterfat test, a better understanding of how cheese can be made, and testing for bovine tuberculosis.[1]
As the Agriculture department grew, it needed its own space. In 1884 the Agriculture department was housed in South Hall on Bascom Hill, and the hall was renamed Agriculture Hall for a time.[6] By this time the Bascom Hill mall was largely full, so new buildings were constructed in other areas. In 1890 the UW added a modest wooden dairy building, probably near the Horse Barn.[7] That first Dairy building was replaced in 1892 by Hiram Smith Hall.[8] The Horticulture and Agricultural Physics building was added in 1894 and 1896, on that farm a half mile west of Bascom Mall.[9] The Dairy Barn was added in 1897.[10] In 1903 Agriculture Hall was added a quarter mile west of Bascom Mall, a three-story Neoclassical-styled building designed by J.T.W. Jennings. The classical styling was a change from the previous ag buildings, which had mostly been in Tudor Revival style.[1]
The turn of the century was a time of great expansion at the UW, and with the Bascom Hill mall filled, buildings were going up here and there in various styles. If this continued, some regents were concerned that the campus would become an ugly hodgepodge of styles sprawled out in a way that would make students frequently walk a mile between classes. So in 1906 they hired Warren P. Laird and Paul Philippe Cret to work with Arthur Peabody, the campus's supervising architect, to draw up a master plan for future construction at the Madison campus. Laird was a professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Cret was a French-born architect teaching at the same university. The three began working on the plan, with Peabody and Charles Van Hise acting as liaisons between the Pennsylvanians and the UW. Some goals of the plan were saccharine, like "Improvement of the Main Campus," but others influenced Henry Mall, like "Creation of a monumental centre" and "Grouping of Departments by affinity as far as practicable within existing conditions."[1]
In 1907 Cret produced a preliminary study that contains the germ of the idea for Henry Mall. He wrote:
The ensemble, formed by the Agricultural Building at the head, on one side by Agricultural Engineering, Agronomy and the proposed building for Agricultural Chemistry and Bacteriology and on the other side by the future Men's Dormitories, is, however, incomplete, if the fourth side is an unsightly fence surrounding the athletic field and placed in an oblique direction with regard to the axis of the ensemble. It seems that this group of buildings could be made very beautiful and comparable only to one of which Bascom Hill is the focus, if fourth side were formed by the imposing mass of the new Gymnasium, preceded by an approach arranged as a Court of Honor with a flag pole in the center. The slope of 50 ft. between the Agricultural Building and the new Gymnasium is graded naturally and allows a full view of the mall, 150 feet wide and more than 900 feet in length.[1]
Laird presented a more developed draft plan in 1908, covering most of the UW. The departments around Henry Mall area, then called the Lesser Mall, were conceived to be "technical," geographically close to both the pure science departments to the east and the university farm to the west. While many of the buildings on the Bascom Hill mall were roughly Italianate and clad in sandstone, the buildings around Henry Mall would be roughly Neoclassical, clad in brick with limestone trim, following the lead of the already-built 1903 Agriculture Hall. The regents approved this plan, and the UW began acquiring the land around Henry Mall. Laird and Cret were further hired to design some of the buildings around the mall.[1]
Here are the buildings and structures around the mall, in the order built. They are contributing properties to the district unless noted otherwise: