John Shearer: Soon-To-Be-Razed Greve Hall At UTK Named For Chattanoogan

Chattanooga has had several pioneering women educators over the years, from the founders of Girls Preparatory School and Bright School to those involved in early leadership positions in the local public and Catholic schools.

But in my small research into that topic over the years, never had I come across the name of Harriet Greve. That was in part because she left Chattanooga as a young woman after having taught at the local public high schools.

She eventually began working at colleges and soon found herself in the high-profile position of dean of women at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville for three decades before and after World War II.

The contributions of this daughter of a couple of well-known Chattanogans eventually led to the naming of Greve Hall at UT in her honor in the 1960s.

Her name came to my attention recently because I was writing a freelance story for a Knoxville News Sentinel-affiliated paper about the planned razing of three former dorms on campus – Henson Hall, Dunford Hall and, yes, Greve Hall.

While personally saddened to hear about the razing of the three buildings that in my opinion characterize well a certain period in architectural and UT’s history, I wrote a newsy, objective story about the coming changes.

I wrote an additional story on Ms. Greve and am including even more information on her Chattanooga family connections here.

As background, the buildings are located near where Volunteer Boulevard comes into Cumberland Avenue by the arched pedestrian bridge. UT recently announced that the Haslam College of Business is planning a large expansion across Volunteer Boulevard with a state-of-the-art building designed in part to meet the growing business school enrollment.

To make way for it, the three mentioned buildings, which have collectively sat in a horseshoe pattern near Cumberland Avenue for decades, will be torn down perhaps beginning as early as 2023. The collegiate Gothic Henson Hall – which is particularly eye pleasing in a classical architectural sense -- was opened in 1930, while the more-mid-century-looking Greve and Dunford halls were completed in 1955 and 1963, respectively.

All three mostly brick structures were also designed by Barber & McMurry, which was headed until his death in 1962 by the respected Knoxville architect, Charles Barber. His firm also designed Grace Episcopal Church on Brainerd Road here in Chattanooga, among possibly other local structures.

When gathering the material for the story, Chris Cimino, the senior vice chancellor for finance and administration at UT, told me via email that officials had put a lot of thought into the project before making the decision to put the business school addition there.

“The decision to raze any building is not taken lightly and is studied carefully,” he said. He went on to say that the buildings do not have structural issues but have suffered from deferred maintenance.

Knox Heritage executive director Christine Cloninger expressed disappointment at the news, however.

"Knox Heritage is disheartened by the University of Tennessee’s plans to raze Henson, Dunford, and Greve Halls,” she said. “While we understand that buildings can become outdated, particularly as technological needs quickly advance, we had hoped that UT’s creation of the Campus Heritage Plan in 2009 would lead to historic preservation playing a larger role in campus planning.

“Our organization strongly believes that the campus’ rich architectural heritage can serve as both an evocative sense of place for alumni and an asset for cultivating future Vols."

As a growing and expanding university with landlocked space, UT has had to make similar decisions with other historic buildings in recent years. Among other structures there torn down in the last 10 years or so or are scheduled to be torn down are Estabrook Hall, Stokely Athletics Center, Gibbs Hall, the older Sophronia Strong Hall, the music and nursing buildings, the Carousel Theatre, and most of the high-rise Presidential Court dorms from the 1960s.

The university has built quite a few eye-pleasing and new collegiate Gothic or Tudor structures in their places, though, while adding enhanced landscaping on streets like Volunteer Boulevard.

Of these three buildings in question now, including Greve Hall, all share the same history of originally being women’s dorms, despite differences in age and looks.

Greve Hall, located at the western top of the horseshoe, features both arches made of precast stone like an older-style building and a mid-century-style covered breezeway. Originally called West Hall, it was renamed in honor of Ms. Greve in 1963, with her in attendance.

Women from Chattanooga and elsewhere who attended UT in the late 1950s and early 1960s particularly had a good chance of staying there before all the Presidential Court dorms started being built in the 1960s.

Greve Hall became a coed dorm in the 1990s, but in the last few years has served as office space for everything from the Office of Information Technology to the Student Success Center, according to a directory there.
While Greve Hall’s time serving UT will soon come to an end, UT official Cimino praised it and one of the other doomed dorms, saying, “Dunford and Greve Halls have served the university well.”

And UT officials have said they plan to continue honoring the memory of Ms. Greve and the namesakes of the other buildings in some way.

Naming a UT building after a woman who was not a benefactor of the school was somewhat unique at the time. Apparently so was Harriet Greve.

As the university’s first fulltime dean of women, she served from the early 1920s to 1951 and helped break a few proverbial glass ceilings. That is, even though the girl students with whom she worked still had somewhat limited career opportunities, with many likely focused more on one day raising families due to the social norms of the times.

Finding much information on her personality was hard due to the passage of time and the fact the youngest women who were students under her are now around 90 and older, but one reference called her a strict disciplinarian.

A News Sentinel obituary at the time of her death in December 1969 added perhaps more sympathetic insight by saying, “A gracious, soft-spoken woman, she could on occasion grow stern.” The obituary added that she had also counseled women students through tragedies and light-hearted situations.

She no doubt also had diplomatic and natural leadership skills to hold her position at a time when men made most of the decisions at a school like UT. And in pushing for what was in the best interest of women students, she likely helped advance their standing in a pioneering manner, too.

As then-UT President Dr. Andy Holt said in prepared remarks about her contributions when the former West Hall was renamed Greve Hall after her in June 1963, “Dean Greve really ‘stirred up’ this campus in giving women students the consideration and rights that they deserved.”

With some information found at the Chattanooga Public Library and the McClung Historical Collection at Knoxville and through the help of UT archivist Alesha Shumar, I was able to get a fuller picture of her life.

She was born Harriet Cone Greve in 1885 in Cincinnati. Her father, Charles Greve, was a doctor and moved the family to Chattanooga. Born in Germany in 1842, he emigrated to the United States and fought for the Union in the Civil War as a member of the Kansas 62nd Cavalry.

He became a medical doctor after the war, but poor health forced him to retire from that and join his brother in downtown Cincinnati in a drug and pharmacy operation. After Charles Greve relocated to Chattanooga in 1888, he operated a pharmacy at 6th and Market streets until his death in 1904 while in his early 60s.

He lived with his family at what was then called 636 Douglas St. by the current UTC campus. This man who was president of the state pharmacy board and evidently well respected and liked in Chattanooga was buried in the National Cemetery here.

Perhaps in part due to his death, Harriet Greve’s mother, Jeannette, set an example of being a pioneering career woman for her daughter. About 18 years younger than her husband, she went on to serve as a society editor of the Chattanooga Times and later as an associate editor of McCall’s magazine and as a freelance writer. She later lived with her daughter in Knoxville at the time of her death in 1932 at the age of 72.

Future Dean Greve had graduated from UT in 1906 and then taught high school in Chattanooga. At the time of her graduation from UT, Harriet Greve’s older sister, Dorothy, was a teacher at Chattanooga High.

Harriet later taught apparently at Chattanooga High, too, before switching over to being a teacher at Central High, the county school, about 1910.

The family apparently held on to the Douglas Street home in Chattanooga after Dr. Greve’s death, but also lived at such addresses as the Elizabeth Apartments, 441 McCalie Ave. and 116 McCallie Ave. before Harriet and her mother apparently moved to New York.

Harriet received a graduate degree from Columbia University in New York City in 1913 and during the years also taught at a school in Belton, N.Y., and at a then-women’s college in South Carolina now known as Columbia College.

Although further research would be required to verify if they crossed paths, noted artist Georgia O’Keefe taught art at the Palmetto State school about the time Ms. Greve would have been on the staff.

When World War I broke out, Ms. Greve took a position overseeing still-standing Furnald Hall at Columbia in New York when it housed women graduate students. She stayed there until coming to UT as the first fulltime dean of women about 1921. Prior to that, the position was overseen on a part-time basis by women also on the teaching faculty.

UT would have a dean of women until 1970 and had a dean of men until the positions were merged into dean of students and later titles.

Some writeups in the UT annual, the “Volunteer,” and in the girl students’ handbook, “The Tennessee Girl,” shed some light on life for women while Ms. Greve was the dean. There were certain times when girls could have guests and they had to be registered, quiet hours were from 8 p.m. to 9 a.m. (except from 10 to 11 p.m.), and students were strongly encouraged to go to a house of worship on weekends.

Regimented times and rules existed for dating, and slacks were not allowed in the cafeterias.

In a later interview, Ms. Greve – who had organized counseling and hostess services during her tenure -- said she adapted to the changing times, such as later embracing girl cheerleaders after initially being against them when only men had been cheerleaders.

Although never a mother herself and someone who apparently never married, she became a mother figure to countless students. As she said in one newspaper interview, “Above all, I’ve wanted our girls to learn to adjust to life as they meet it.”

She had lived in Aconda Court alongside Cumberland Avenue by the campus with Mrs. Fannie Luttrell Powers, and they later lived in her retirement in a cottage off Roaring Fork Road in Gatlinburg, where they had entertained students.

Ms. Greve lived the last eight years of her life in Athens, Ga., where her sister, Mrs. Milton T. Jarnagin, and a couple of nieces, Mrs. Walter Sams and Mrs. Dorothy Burnet, also lived. Ms. Greve’s sister had married a University of Georgia professor, Milton Jarnagin, who worked with the animal husbandry program in the school’s agriculture college.

Her sister, who was also briefly married to and widowed from well-known Chattanoogan Samuel McAllister after her first husband’s death, died in Athens in 1963.

Harriet Greve was a resident of the Twin Oaks nursing home in Athens at the time of her death while in her mid-80s.

She was buried in Oconee Hill Cemetery in Athens across the street from the University of Georgia’s Sanford Stadium, where her beloved UT is to face the Bulldogs on Saturday in a game of national football implications.

Although she was left blind at the end of her life, she was known to have had quite a vision for the development of girls at UT. Like the artistic, ground-level breezeway at Greve Hall, she tried to make their passage through school easier and more rewarding.

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Jcshearer2@comcast.net