Feature: History Behind The Bricks

By Jess Camp

Published Nov. 14, 2006

A sense of history should fill you whenever you open the doors to a building on campus and step inside — unless it's an exam day, in which case it's perfectly acceptable to be moody. But when you wander the halls, you might be taking the exact same steps that Elizabeth Vargas and Sheryl Crow once took. It would be even better to know that you slept in the exact same bed in which Brad Pitt slept. It just so happens that almost every building on campus was named after an important person, but they just don't receive as much recognition as the celebrities who graduated from MU.

Laws Hall

Laws Residence Hall was named after Samuel Spahr Laws, who was the university's president from 1876 to 1889. Laws was a man surrounded by controversy. He was a very opinionated and an authoritative man. During the Civil War he was arrested for disloyalty. Laws was locked in a prison in St. Louis, but he was released after he promised to leave the country. So he packed up and booked it to Europe. After the war, he went to New York City where he became president of the gold exchange on Wall Street. While working there, he invented the 'gold ticker,' which is a device that helped to indicate the price of gold to the public.

After his time at the gold exchange, Laws was hired as the president of MU.

Laws was not very well liked among the students for several reasons. He was reluctant to build dorms because he felt that it was more beneficial for students to live with local families than with other students. At this time, though, there were only six students in the graduating class.

He also didn't like the Greek system and tried to control the type of clothing women were allowed to wear. He also didn't believe that women should have been allowed to attend MU.

His downfall was due to a dead elephant. Emperor, the so-called "second largest elephant in the world," died while the traveling circus that owned him was in Liberty. When Laws heard about this, he thought that it would be nice for MU science students to have the carcass. So he bought the dead elephant and had it stuffed. The curators reimbursed him for the money he spent, which threw legislators into an uproar. They had already told Laws that they did not want to buy a dead elephant.

"This elephant business had something to do in creating the disgust that caused me to resign," Laws later told the Kansas City Star.

Read Hall

Read Hall was named after Daniel Read, the president of MU from 1866 to 1876. This hall was the first residence hall that was built for women.

Read made a lot of contributions to MU. He founded the Normal College on campus, which was the school that women could attend.

He was a strong advocate for the education of women and for women to be teachers.

"Women are better teachers of children than men. It is their mission — their God-given appointed work," Read once said.

He was fired when Democrats gained control of the state legilature. He was 71 when he was fired, which makes him the oldest person to ever serve as the president of MU.

Brady Commons

Brady Commons has recently been in the spotlight. The students behind the "Not My Brady" blog and students from other organizations have urged Chancellor Brady Deaton to change the name of Brady Commons because Thomas Allen Brady, the building's namesake, was known for expelling people from the university because of their sexual orientation.

Brady graduated with a Ph.D. from Harvard and began teaching at MU in 1930. He took over the position of vice president in 1946 and was a member of the faculty until his death in 1964.

"No one has proposed a name change to the curators," UM system spokesman Scott Charton said.

This recent controversy draws attention to the process of naming a building on campus after someone, which can take years.

"They're always named after people who've made a significant contribution to the university. Sometimes that's monetary, and sometimes it's for teachers and senators," Director of Development External Relations Beth Hammock said.

Faurot Field

Faurot Field was named after Don Faurot, a former football coach, in 1972. Faurot coached the Tigers from 1934 to 1956, taking a timeout during World War II to coach the Navy Pre-Flight team at the University of Iowa.

He led the Tigers to a second place finish in the Big 6 division in 1936, their first winning season since 1929. Faurot coached his boys to win conference championships in 1939 and 1941. He also led them to the Orange Bowl in 1940 and the Sugar Bowl in 1942.

Faurot also invented the Split-T formation. This formation helped the Tigers to have an 8-1 season.

In 1995 when the fake turf in the field was switched to grass, Faurot laid the last piece of sod onto the ground.

The Hearnes Center

The Hearnes Center was named after Warren Hearnes, who served as governor of Missouri from 1964 to 1972. The building was opened in 1972. It is still used mostly for sports, but sometimes for concerts, conventions and commencements as well.

"It makes me feel very proud to have a building named after me," Hearnes said. "It's just something that the people wanted to do for me."

Hearnes had seen a building at the University of Illinois that he liked and thought that MU needed one that would resemble it. The school needed a new basketball court, so Hearnes called the president of MU and told him that he needed to build the center. But the president told him that no one was interested in that idea and that it was one of the least important projects on the list of buildings to be built.

So Hearnes replied, "It just went to No. 1." He lobbied it through the legislature and watched out for it until it finally was constructed.