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Deja vu at WCU
Hearing the news that Western Carolina University’s main entrance off N.C. 107 will be closed for five weeks started me thinking about the old days when that entrance didn’t exist because that portion of the highway hadn’t yet been built.
Although it may be hard for our younger readers to believe, there was a time when the main campus entrance was on what’s now called “Old 107.” That’s the road that follows the river from Ashe Settlement until it finally crosses the Tuckaseigee in downtown Cullowhee via a bridge that was built after the 1940 flood destroyed the one that used to be there.
Back in the olden days (just ask my children how old) when I first saw Cullowhee, the Valley of the Lilies looked a good deal different than it does today. To illustrate that point, let’s use a Top 10 List of things that weren’t there when I was a student.
1) H.F. Robinson Building
2) Coulter Building (This was called the Music/English Building for several years.)
3) Natural Science Building
4) Walker
5) Harrill (Began construction during the summer of 1971.)
6) Bell Tower
7) Soccer Field
8) Whitmire Stadium
9) Ramsey Center
10) picnic area
Back in those ancient times, football was played on a beautiful little field located where the Natural Science Building stands today. And basketball standout Henry Logan set his many scoring records in Reid Gym.
Administrative offices were located in Bird Building, and science classes all met in Stillwell. If you got sick, you went to Graham (known simply as the Infirmary), not Bird, and you attended English classes on McKee’s top floor.
We got our mail where Wachovia Bank is now, and we washed clothes at a wonderful laundromat that was located where Bob’s is now.
But of all the things I miss about the Cullowhee I discovered back in 1970, I’d have to put the Town House at the top of the list. That place was crowded with students and professors from the time it opened (about 7 a.m.) until it shut its doors around 10 p.m.
Customers yelled their orders over the noise of the crowd and listened for the cooks to announce that their food was ready. My exam-week breakfasts never varied: It was a heated honeybun and a Coke each morning of every finals week.
It was a boom time for WCU. During my first quarter (they hadn’t invented semesters yet), I lived in a dorm so new it didn’t have a name – it was called High Rise, since it was by far the tallest building on campus. Belk Building was new, too, and the art department was in the process of moving there from Joyner, which burned down in 1981.
Construction soon began on Harrill and Walker, with Forsyth, which we called the Business Building for years, soon to follow. Students were overflowing the place. I lived in a study room for two or three weeks because housing officials, secure in the statistics that told them many first-year students don’t last more than a month, had overbooked the dorms.
But what really triggered my memories of the Cullowhee that used to be was the fact that the main campus entrance would be closed to allow for road construction. During my years as a student and two subsequent tours as a staff member, the road in front of the bank (Centennial Drive now) was dug up over and over again.
Once it was to work on the storm drainage (there’s a whole creek under there) and once it was to bury power lines. I never knew the reasons for all the other times.
I just know it gave us something to watch while sitting in the front booth at the Town House.
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