If These Walls Could Talk,

they’d speak of early morning classes in the tower, friendships forged among faculty members, and winter nights spent filling the arch with snow.

by John Hopkins

The building was named for Captain John H. Kauke, a Wooster merchant, banker, and early supporter of the College who served as a trustee from 1866 until his death in 1904.

» Back to the Future
(restoration, modernization planned for Kauke Hall)

To Woosterians a century ago, Kauke Hall must have seemed the physical embodiment of an answered prayer.

On the morning of December 11, 1901, the College’s main building had burned to the ground. Classrooms, laboratories, equipment, books, manuscripts – even the registrar’s records – were gone.

"The history of education in America contains no record of a disaster so completely prostrating an institution of learning," wrote the editors of The Index. Wooster’s survival hung in the balance.

One year later to the day, thanks to a fund-raising effort whose linchpin was a $100,000 challenge grant from Andrew Carnegie, the College dedicated four new buildings to replace Old Main: Kauke, Scovel, Severance, and Taylor halls. It was, Lucy Lilian Notestein wrote, "a new Wooster, a Wooster that had risen as by the hand of a magician." [For more on the rebuilding effort, see Wooster, Fall 2001, pp. 58-59.]

Together, the new buildings formed an architecturally harmonious whole, though that had not been President Edward Louis Holden’s vision for the new Wooster. He had wanted to design each in a different style – one Gothic, one Tudor, one Spanish, one French – as a sort of built-in architecture lesson for Wooster’s students. But as William H. McSurely of the Class of 1886 noted in a 1924 letter to the Alumni Bulletin, "Some of the trustees thought this was a serious mistake as violating a fundamental principle of harmony and unity of design in group building."

The “castle on the hill.”

The trustees consulted Daniel Burnham, architect of New York’s Flatiron Building and Washington’s Union Station. Burnham, who had served as director of works for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, advised them to settle on a single style. The trustees voted to adopt collegiate Gothic, which Holden had proposed for Kauke, for the entire quartet. If the president was disappointed, he kept his own counsel. Perhaps the selection of his brother, L. C. Holden, as Kauke’s architect was some solace.

Kauke Hall arose, literally, from the ashes of Old Main. (The fill around its foundation contains bricks from the old building.) And it was built to last around a massive timber frame, with four-inch-thick floors formed by laying two-by-fours on edge, a style more commonly seen in warehouses of that era. "In effect, the floor is its own floor joist," says Peter Schantz, the College’s director of physical plant. The exterior is brick, trimmed with Bedford limestone and grey terra cotta. The bricks, though manufactured in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, get their distinctive, yellow-grey color from a clay found in Ohio.

The building was named for Captain John H. Kauke, a Wooster merchant, banker, and early supporter of the College who served as a trustee from 1866 until his death in 1904. Ninety years later, when his great-great-great grandson, Tony Kauke ’98, arrived from his home in California as a first-year student, he was pleasantly surprised to find himself in "the only place on Earth where people say my name correctly."

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