One of the oldest buildings on the Baylor School campus will soon be the initial stopping place for those who might become the school’s newest students.
After years of operating in various offices in Hunter Hall, the school’s entire admissions office in the near future will move into the remodeled former Founder’s Home, one of the original Lupton Circle buildings dating to 1915.
The building was initially the residence of school founder and head John Roy Baylor and his family until his death in 1926.
Since then, it has been used as a residence for various faculty members and was converted into upstairs and downstairs apartments in the mid-1930s.
With its historic architecture at a scenic spot on top of the hill, officials hope it also becomes a brick and mortar admissions salesman for the school. It will definitely be easier to notice and more attention grabbing than the admissions office has been previously, believes admissions and enrollment director Jim Kennedy.
“The thinking was that the admissions office ought to be the face of the school,” said Mr. Kennedy as he and school maintenance supervisor Howard Johnson gave a tour of the facility recently while numerous workers were busily at work.
The two-story office will include several features. On the first floor will be a gathering area in the large great room where the fireplace is. Mr. Kennedy said a large mural of the school as it looked not long after it relocated to its current site from downtown will be on one side of the fireplace, and a current overhead shot of the school will be on the other side.
Also in that room will be a 55-inch touch-screen monitor in which prospective students and their families can get a virtual tour of a specific aspect or part of the campus, in case they are unable to see those places in person for whatever reason.
“It’s going to effectively shorten the time on a tour,” Mr. Kennedy said.
His office and the day admissions offices will be on the first floor, with dorm admissions and financial aid offices on the upper floor, where another fireplace is located.
A new staircase in the general area where the original stairs stood before being removed years ago is being constructed, and drywall has been put over the old plaster walls. New metal doorframes are also being installed.
The Founder’s Home and all the original buildings on the current Baylor campus were designed by Atlanta architect W.T. Downing, who was gaining much acclaim before his untimely death in 1918 after being struck while crossing a street in Philadelphia while in his early 50s.
Some of his other buildings in Chattanooga, including the former Hotel Patten and the older buildings at UT-Chattanooga by McCallie Avenue, have pointed arches similar to the passageway next to Founder’s Home.
Mr. Kennedy pointed out with a smile that anyone taller than average height will have to lower his or her head to get under one of the arches, because they were apparently designed in the 1910s when people were smaller. But officials believe overall that the building and adjoining features should work out well with today’s needs.
UTC art and architecture professor Dr. Gavin Townsend calls the Founder’s Home Tudor Revival in style and pretty typical for the time it was built. “The style was associated with Oxford and Cambridge and academic environments in general,” he said.
While the decorative half-timber trim on the Baylor building is cream colored, on traditional Tudor Revival buildings, it is dark brown, Dr. Townsend added.
With the brick on the front, he said the original brick mason employed the old American bond of having the long side of brick – or the stretcher – facing the front, but replacing that with the header – or short end – every few rows going vertically.
“But the more common running bond (with stretchers showing on every row) was used for the side with the half-timbering,” he said.
Concerning the home’s history, Mr. Johnson said no old papers or items belonging to Professor Baylor or his family have been found behind the walls of Founder’s Home, as sometimes happens on those TV shows about historic residential renovations.
“I was kind of hoping for that, but it’s been remodeled so many times that someone else got the pleasure of that,” Mr. Johnson said with a smile.
However, the project has still been intriguing, he added. “Just the history of how old it is and what transpired here are interesting,” he said.
Despite not accidentally uncovering any new history, he and the workers – by design -- have uncovered some old openings and entrances.
The covered brick walkway from the old Richmond Lounge building with the low arches now has an opening near the old home like in the old days. Also, the mid-century metallic covering on the front porch – similar to that found on a current faculty apartment at Lupton Hall – has been removed, and that area will be the new main entrance.
Years ago, an inside opening was apparently made from Founder’s Home into a former apartment, which was the original kitchen area for the school cafeteria. That area will also be part of the admissions office.
The old kitchen area in the past served as apartments for such faculty members as Mike Reisman and Dean Sterling, while the upstairs and downstairs apartments in Founder’s Home have housed such faculty members as Ron and Lorraine Stewart, Jack and Penny Batt, Doug Hale, Bryce Harris, Charles Berryman, and Stan and Doniphan Lewis, among possibly others.
Commandant John Fisher and his family, including alumnus Buddy Fisher, also lived in Founder’s Home in the 1930s and 1940s.
Buddy Fisher, a member of the Class of 1946, lived in the old house beginning in 1931 as a small child after his father, who had attended the U.S. Naval Academy, came to Baylor to work.
They originally lived in the entire house, where the semi-retired Professor Baylor had died suddenly on Aug. 17, 1926, at age 74 after feeling ill and hurriedly walking up the hill from the area around the original outdoor swimming pool.
Mr. Fisher as a small child said he never pondered the home’s brief prior history after they moved into it when he was very young.
“I didn’t think about whose home it had been,” he said in a telephone interview. “I thought somebody’s got to live there. I never saw any ghosts. I just lived there and enjoyed living on campus.”
Mr. Fisher recalled that the home had a room on the first floor straight back from the front door, where the faculty gathered during breaks in their classes. It was basically just a smoking room in those days when many schoolteachers everywhere smoked, he joked.
According to Jim Hitt’s book, “It Never Rains After Three O’clock,” the smoking room apparently started when Founder’s Home was vacant for a period after Professor Baylor’s death.
About 1935, the home was converted into two apartments, and the Fishers took the upstairs. The younger Mr. Fisher – who remembers having some toy soldiers in his bedroom and a toy train in the attic while living there – said that the original stairs were removed at that time. The upstairs, meanwhile, was reconfigured with an entrance over near the quadrangle flagpole.
Moving into the downstairs apartment of Founder’s Home after this remodeling was Col. Roy Erwin and his family.
The Fishers continued to live in the upstairs apartment until his father began serving on active duty during World War II. Mr. Fisher then moved to Hunter Hall (then Academic Building), where he remembered the longtime Baylor teacher George Bradford had an apartment on one end and Dean Sterling on the other. “Judge” Bradford, who had worked at Baylor off and on since 1905, had a speech disability, he recalled, and mostly tutored students by that time.
The basement of the Academic Building – which was later converted into classroom space -- was used to store rifles during the then-all-male school’s military days, he recalled. They were kept in a basement in the Lupton Circle area and covered with cosmoline during the summers by Army order to keep them from rusting.
After the war, Mr. Fisher’s father returned to Baylor, but he and his wife initially lived in the Read House for a period. However, in 1946, after the unfortunate death of Col. Erwin due to cancer, the Fishers moved back into Founder’s home on the lower level.
Charles Berryman had by that time moved into the upper level.
Matt Lewis, the son of the late Stan and Doniphan Lewis and the current chief advancement officer at Baylor, said he has many memories of living in the Founder’s Home’s upper apartment. They moved into the Berrymans’ former apartment in the upper level in 1968 from Lupton Annex before his seventh-grade year.
He remembers it in large part for its convenience during his six years as a Baylor student before graduating in 1974. The former apartment entrance door near the flagpole, which is now being converted into a window, was a convenient place to keep his books without having to lug them all around or keep some of them in a locker.
“I’d come back by here and drop off this book and that book and pick up my other books and be on my way,” he said.
He also thought he had come up with another practical way to enjoy living in an apartment in the central part of his school, but he soon realized that did not work quite as well.
His bedroom faced the quadrangle on top of the hill on one side, but a side window opened out onto a flat roof above where the apartment was that had once been the cafeteria kitchen. There was also a sturdy drain pole by the roof that he as an agile youngster could shimmy down and sneak out at night.
He did that once and thought he had life figured out. But then he realized he had forgotten an important aspect of sneaking out. “The first time I did it I didn’t have a plan for sneaking back in,” he said with a laugh, adding that his father, the naturally animated and longtime history teacher Mr. Lewis, did a double take when he had to open the door after an embarrassed Matt knocked on it.
One activity that naturally kept him at home was playing pool. His father had the idea of putting a billiards table in their living room, despite the fact that it took up the whole room and was laborious to take up the steps. However, the family soon realized it was a good idea.
“It was a draw for the boarders because my mother always wanted to be hospitable,” Matt said.
The Lewises ate most of their meals at the Guerry Hall dining hall, which at that time was much smaller. But occasionally they would eat out. Matt said he hated to miss out on the games with the other youngsters outside the dining hall when he was young, but when he was a high school student, he started enjoying going out to restaurants periodically.
When they would eat in their apartment, they would dine in the sunroom-type room in the southeast corner of the upper floor that has multiple small windows. Because that room offered and still offers quite a view of Lupton Circle, the mountains, and parts of the Tennessee River and Williams Island, they would get comfortably filled up with breath-taking scenery, too.
“It was a beautiful scene as you ate a meal,” Mr. Lewis said. “Even at that age I could appreciate that.”
Jcshearer2@comcast.net
To listen to a brief interview with Jim Kennedy about the future of Founder’s Home, click
here.
To hear Howard Johnson discuss the renovation project, click
here.
To hear Matt Lewis’ memories of living in Founder’s Home, click
here.