Occupied or vacant, Main Building has always been central to Antioch’s identify. For years, the imposing landmark appeared prominently on the college’s website and in promotional materials even while it fell into disrepair and became home to pigeons.
Now, after two renovations, a half-dozen years apart, Main Building, formally called Antioch Hall, is slowly coming back to life. Thanks to work supported by an alumnus, the college can now legally reoccupy the first floor, where a succession of presidents, starting with Horace Mann, had their offices. A fundraising campaign is under way to refurbish the three upper floors, including iconic Kelly Hall, where donors are offered numerous naming opportunities.
“The feeling is that the building itself is in pretty good shape. It’s got good bones,” says Natalie Kubat, who was running the campaign as executive director of Advancement and is currently Interim President. “There’s not a lot structurally that needs to happen.” Much of the remaining work involves “sweeping and painting and new carpet and things like that on the first floor,” she says. “Looking ahead, the team will focus on modernizing the building’s plumbing to restore functioning bathrooms and ensure Kelly Hall is fully accessible to everyone.”
As old as the college itself, Antioch Hall rose up “stark and bare from the stubble of a wheat field” in 1853, longtime college administrator W. Boyd “Alex” Alexander wrote, but eventually drew protection and beauty from surrounding trees. Combining Tudor and Romanesque revival styles, architect Elbridge Boyden modeled both Antioch Hall and Davis Hall, at Worcester Academy in Massachusetts, on James Renwick Jr.’s designs for the Smithsonian Castle in Washington D.C. To historian Hendrik Willem Van Loon, the turreted structure looked like a billiard table with its legs in the air.
Builder Alpheus Marshall Merrifield, a member of the committee that established the college, “thought in grandiose terms,” Antioch Archivist Scott Sanders writes in a book chapter entitled, “Establishing the Faith: Horace Mann and the Redemption of Antioch College.”1 Whether or not Antioch Hall was the largest building west of the Alleghenies, as early college catalogues claimed, it was ambitious. Costing way over budget, it helped send the college into early bankruptcy. The school survived, and over the years, Main Building proved adaptable to changing college needs.
Before Antioch erected separate buildings for science and a library, both were housed in Antioch Hall, as was a museum. The 35-foot-high space occupying inner sections of the second and third floors went through several transformations. For its first five decades, it was the Antioch Chapel, with row upon row of church pews. When Simeon Fess became president in 1908, “one of his top priorities was to build the college’s first gymnasium,” Antioch’s Instagram page states. His ambition coincided with Trustee Edwin S. Kelly’s pursuit of a gym to host the annual Greene County high school basketball tournament. Kelly, an industrialist whose Kelly-Springfield Tire Co. (now a Goodyear subsidiary) manufactured tires for carriages and then autos, put up one-third of the money to convert the chapel into a multipurpose gym and auditorium.
Named Kelly Hall, the transformed space became a center not only for basketball but for dances, performances, talks, conferences, panel discussions, and movies. Its poor acoustics, faulted by W.B. Alexander, among others, were improved in the 1950s under the direction of Professor of Music Walter Anderson.
No doubt encouraged by Kelly Hall’s success as a venue, Antioch drew a range of cultural and civic events initiated by both the college and wider community. The college hosted the first college bluegrass concert, by the Osborne Brothers, who may actually have performed in the gym; blues guitarist Albert King; pianist and “free jazz” pioneer Cecil Taylor (who was Visiting Professor of Music and Artist in Residence, 1971-1973), folk singer-songwriter Dar Williams; pop singer Roberta Flack, and folksinger-activist Malvina Reynolds, among others.
Sanders records that in 1944, before the United States entered World War II, Eleanor Roosevelt addressed a postwar reconstruction conference at Antioch hosted by the American Friends Service Committee, along with novelist Pearl Buck and Socialist presidential aspirant Norman Thomas. In 1964, when opposition to the Vietnam War began to stir campus activism, Antioch hosted a Vietnam Colloquium that drew independent journalist I.F. Stone and then-Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who years later leaked the classified, devastating war history dubbed the Pentagon Papers.
Antioch Hall offered early exposure to a young civil rights activist, Bayard Rustin, 16 years before he organized Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington. Rustin’s 1947 address, “How to Conquer Jim Crow” inspired then-undergraduate Coretta Scott’s commitment to fighting segregation on her own and as King’s wife. Other speakers who found a receptive audience in Antioch Hall included then-Sen. Hubert Humphrey, Democrat from Minnesota, social critic Susan Sontag, and activist defense lawyer William Kunstler. While many speakers were left of center politically, Antiochians also heard George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the Nazi-aligned German-American Bund, in 1964. Students didn’t heckle, but when Rockwell and opened the floor to questions, “Antioch students silently and as one, rose and walked out of Kelly Hall,” according to a 2008 piece in The Record by Alex Mette, drawing from Sanders’s book, Antioch: An Episode in History.
So heavily was Kelly Hall used, and at times casually abused, that routine maintenance couldn’t keep pace. In the fall of 1969, then-Community Manager Peter Fessenden pointed out “the goddamn cigarette burns on the carpet,” and exhorted an incoming class not to add to the problem.
Antioch Hall’s “good bones,” referenced by Kubat, owe much to a major reconstruction begun in 1957, funded by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. The million-dollar project gutted the interior and replaced the wooden structure inside the outer brick walls with concrete and steel, providing added strength as well as fire protection. By lowering ceilings, the work allowed the addition of a fourth floor and increased the available space by 25 percent, according to an archived proposal. Kelly Hall gained an expanded balcony, boosting its capacity from 450 people to more than 670.
Some 60 years later, the concrete structure remained intact, but Antioch Hall was in no condition to resume operation when the college reopened in 2011 after its three-year closure. The building needed a new heating system because the college’s steam plant had shut down when the college closed. A broken attic sprinkler system in 2009 had caused significant flooding, asbestos needed to be removed, ceiling tiles needed replacement, and lights in Kelly Hall needed rewiring. According to the Yellow Springs News, a study commissioned by former President Mark Roosevelt “estimated that $20 million would be needed to bring Antioch Hall ‘back online.’”
Into the breach in 2018 stepped the Yellow Springs Community Foundation (YSCF), which provided about $675,000 to tackle the most pressing problems. Although nowhere close to the estimate Roosevelt received, the amount was unprecedented for the YSCF, which typically provides grants of $5,000. In return, the organization expected that Antioch Hall would be shared by the local community. Executive Director Jeannamarie Cox told the Yellow Springs News: “The building will continue to be used as a college facility, but it will also offer community space where appropriate.”
Earl Reeder, hired to stabilize Antioch Hall, found it in “extremely bad condition.” Among other steps, his firm put in two high-efficiency boilers and hot-water piping throughout the building, remediated “a lot of asbestos,” brought elevators and restrooms up to Americans with Disabilities Act standards, and cleared out “tons and tons” of abandoned desks and chairs. But after the first phase ended, work came to a standstill. The YSCF halted further funding. Cox says then-President Tom Manley and the trustees would not agree to shared use of Antioch Hall by the village: “They didn’t fulfill their part of the obligation.” While the foundation has continued to put money into supporting activities at the college, its board is cautious about future funding for Antioch Hall, she says.
Work resumed this past spring when the college, on its own, hired Reeder’s firm to make improvements necessary to secure an occupancy permit for the first floor. Natalie Kubat told several alumni by email that College President Jane Fernandes “is quite aware of the rift between President Manley and YSCF and we have been working to repair the relationship.”
A fundraising brochure goes partway toward meeting YSCF’s expectations. It promises that “Antioch Hall will provide thoughtfully curated space for local nonprofit and mission-aligned for-profit organizations whose work serves the Ohio Miami Valley region and meaningfully connects with Antioch students, faculty, and staff. By co-locating campus leadership and community partners, Main Building will once again serve as a dynamic crossroads of ideas, service, and collaboration.” Kubat says Kelly Hall has “always been a part of the Yellow Springs community. The high school’s used it, churches have used it.”
Cox says: “What we all hope is that this is an opportunity to change the narrative.” As to Main Building’s future, “Alex” Alexander’s words, written in 1938, carry new meaning: “Long may it stand.”
1Sanders’s chapter appears in Cradles of Conscience, Hodges, O'Donnell & Oliver eds, Kent State University Press, 2003.