With the razing of Lincoln Hall on the Bluffton University campus, the Icon invites viewers who lived there to offer some stories or recollections. Send to: [email protected]. Here are four:
I lived in Lincoln Hall my first year as a freshman 1971 and as a senior in 1975. Even when it was known as a rather dirty, loud, study free dorm. It was always so centrally located on campus and was the closest dormitory to the gymnasiums.
I think most evenings and weekends nights most of Lincoln Hall at some point was over in one of the two gyms playing basketball. This combined with other social activities could be the reasons that Lincoln Hall at least at that point in history was noted as having a fairly low grade point average amongst its residents.
With residence like Everett Collier, Wendell Miller, Tom Heimann, Tim Byers and more of the like, Lincoln Hall was definitely rarely boring and never quiet! I remember third floor being reprimanded because we refused to take part in a fire drill one evening due to a putt-putt golf tournament going on in the third-floor hallway.
I chose to come back to Lincoln for my senior year because I was going to be student teaching and it was the only dorm that had single rooms and I thought by having a single room I could have my own hours to sleep and prepare for my student teaching assignment.
I found out quickly that it doesn't matter if you had a single or a double room, the dorm was just as active and just is noisy and just as hot and just as cold and just as dirty! The Lincoln Hall bricks that will go in my flower bed in the spring will always remind me of a time in my life which I will never forget! (that is not to say that I haven't tried to forget some of these moments :-)
– Timothy Byers, Assistant Professor of Education, Bluffton University
Here's another woman who lived in Lincoln Hall - Bluffton's residence hall "dedicated to God for men." I came to BC as a freshman in the fall of 1947, which was, I think, the second year the hall was changed from a men's dorm to a women's dorm, because there were not enough men on campus during WWII. That change lasted about 10 years, then it went back to being a men's dorm.
First-year students were "privileged" to live on third floor, where my two roommates and I were offered a corner room with a bird's-eye view of Science Hall. In succeeding years, we frosh "graduated" to a lower floor.
It's a different world and a different age - and the years have taken their toll on Lincoln Hall. It's time for a new look and a new purpose to that space. Long live the new science center!
– Joanne Vercler Niswander, class of '51
I lived for two years in Lincoln Hall during the late 1950s, rooming with friend, classmate, and teammate Spike Berry. So simple a building without locks on doors (at least our's) that today – as it goes down – evokes pleasant, even nostalgic, memories.
– Ron Lora, Bluffton
Responding to your request for comments from viewers who once lived in Lincoln Hall on the Bluffton University campus, the hall was a women’s dorm in the early 1950s and I lived there for three years.
Miss Edna Ramseyer was the House Mother during those days. Felt a bit sad it was going to be demolished, but am so grateful. Bluffton University will have a wonderful, much needed, science building.
– Elfrieda Landes Ramseyer, Bluffton
