Click on the image below to see how Adams Hall and Bath Road have changed over the last century.
Seth Adams Hall was built in the early 1860s to house the Medical School of Maine, which was founded at Bowdoin in 1821. Patricia McGraw Anderson writes in her book, The Architecture of Bowdoin College, that “at the time it was built, Seth Adams Hall offered modern spaces, modern equipment, and a totally modern philosophy of teaching sciences. It was also the first solely instructional building at Bowdoin.” But after a devastating review in the early 1900s by medical school investigators, a shrinking faculty body and declining student enrollment due to World War I, and continuing financial losses, the school was shut down in 1921.
On the side of the hall is a wooden grandstand for spectators to watch college baseball games in the adjacent field.
Slider tool by David Francis, senior interactive developer
Absolutely love your “Then and Now” feature. The earlier “Then and Now” on March 19th featuring the “Then” Curtis Poll to the “Now” Kanbar Auditorium, Studzinski Recital Hall was equally impressive.
Can we expect more of the same in the future?
Great photo of “the Delta” the old baseball diamond.
As for Adams Hall – There are some macabre reminders of the Medical School still present in Adams Hall – My understanding was that the main stairway in the building was constructed around an open center shaft to facilitate the hoisting of cadavers from the ground floor to the anatomy rooms in the attic. The hook for the pulley used in this activity was still visible (and may still be) above the stairs.
Also, when I worked at the Art Department in the 1980s there were some antique zinc-lined autopsy tables from the med school that had been modified and were at that time being used in the senior studios. Gross but sort of fascinating.
Finally – There is a great photo of some medical students posing with a half-dissected dead person in Charles Calhoun’s history of the College. Also extremely gross, but very funny – the students are clearly reveling in the poor taste of their action.
Yes! More to come.
………I believe the “adjacent field” is best known as “the delta”.
Was there not a road, perhaps the Bath Road, on the other side of Adams Hall at one time as well? My recollection is the route is still discernible by looking at the tree lines on what were once the sides thereof?
Regarding Andy White’s question about a road “on the other side of Adams Hall,” check out pages 388-391 in “Sills of Bowdoin,” by Herbert Ross Brown. There was a road, Harpswell Street, that ran diagonally across the campus to College St. It was replaced
by a “…driveway…” in 1948 which is named Sills Drive today. The elimination of the section of Harpswell St. resulted in a newly
shaped, quadrangular campus.
From the Editor: That’s right. The road used to run in front of Adams Hall, as shown in this lithograph published in 1907.
Not a Pine tree in sight in the original shot.