In the early morning hours of Jan. 17, 1984, then-professor Jay B. Landis received a phone call: the Ad Building, where he had once lived as a student and had taken classes – biology, speech, Greek, psychology – and which had housed the library, offices, the chapel and auditorium and more, was on fire.
Landis quickly went to the hill above the Eastern Mennonite College campus, where others were gathering, wandering around, watching fire engines scream to the scene.
For six and a half decades the building originally dubbed the “Cracker Box” had served as the hub of campus life. On that night 34 years ago this month, in just hours, without known cause, it was reduced to a blackened shell.
Scroll down to see a video about the fire.
The next morning, Mary Emma Showalter Eby – who like many neighbors had slept through the commotion – looked out her window and saw “heartbreak”: “The tongues of flame that had shot upward in the heat of the inferno had now changed to a red glow softened somewhat by a cloud of smoke.”
The building had been empty for renovating, greatly reducing the fire’s impact on daily campus activity. But times were already difficult for the school. Historian Donald B. Kraybill wrote in Eastern Mennonite University: A Century of Countercultural Education that the university had already been “on the verge of its ‘most severe financial crisis’ ever” in part due to decreased enrollment. [Here’s a special purchase offer of the Centennial history.]
At first the university’s insurance company balked at making payments for the burned building, but many other people offered ready support.
“One day after the fire,” the spring 1984 issue of the Bulletin (now Crossroads) reported, “a Harrisonburg rental agency sent a $200 donation. A grandmother in upstate New York sent $50, noting that she would urge her children to do the same.” The 280 church leaders attending Ministers Week at the time of the fire took initiative and took an offering – of $4,000. College officials asked for donations – $100 per person – from Mennonite Church members, alumni and the broader community.
Read about the fire in the spring 1984 Bulletin.
That spring President Richard C. Detweiler wrote of hope: “A major renovation project that was progressing well and on schedule toward fulfilling a long-awaited dream of a campus center was largely destroyed in three hours on a cold winter morning…. But that’s only half of the story and it’s the first half, not the last. The shattering of our hopes does not mean the end of hope. In fact, the failure of our hopes to materialize is often the context for the rebirth of hope…. A community of hope has been born anew.”
All told, such donations plus the $1 million that insurance ultimately paid would surpass the hoped-for $4.5 million for the ad building’s replacement.
“It will rise again, no doubt in new form,” Eby had written, “but something beautiful and efficient will grow from those ashes. Goodbye, dear old ad building. Hello, new campus center.”
The new Campus Center opened in time for the 1986-87 academic year.
I remember taking a class on Romans taught by Myron Augsburger in the ole Ad Building which some of us United Methodist students fondly call “The Alamo.”
J. Mark and I woke that morning in the house of Sam and Ella Mae Miller, hosted us for Pastor’s Week. When we woke they called us to the front window which had a view from part way up the hill. We stood there horrified. That had been the main hub of student life in the mid-sixties. J. Mark had not only lived there but spent hours in the northeast seminary in corner of the library. It had been our life-line for studies for both of us. We wondered what would happen. Countless stories of campus life live on in so many of our memories of that place. In my mind I see the exact spots where things happened I won’t forget. peering around the library stacks to see who hung out that day, sitting long hours at the table, suppressing an imposible laughing fit with friends, trying to ignore the call of the hill behind the college coming through the high windows. Don’t get me started. We still miss that building.
Old Ad was where I lived for a year along with a rather colorful cast of characters.
I’m surprised the cause of the fire was never identified. I thought I had either read or heard it started from a “salamander”, a portable kerosene heater with a fan commonly used in construction sites. I guess that must have been speculation.
My husband and I were attending “Minister’s Week” and were being housed near the “Ad Building”, when we were awakened by a friend of our daughter Marci, who shouted, “The Ad building is on fire!” So, we joined a host of others, sadly watching the devastating flames! Our hearts were so sad! Later, when the fire had been contained, we joined other pastors in a gathering in Lehman Auditorium trying to console each other. As we joined in the song “Come, Come, Ye Saints”, I remember feeling some sort of solace. “All is well; all is well”. To this day every time I hear that song, I remember the solace it provides.
I an thankful that all 3 of our daughters (LaVonne, Lori and Marci) had the privilege to graduate from the college (now a University) and use what they learned to serve God!
I was in Richmond, VA during the 1983/84 academic year, in grad school at Union Theological Seminary (now Union Presbyterian Seminary). And I was just eight months shy of coming here to begin teaching New Testament at EMS. My grad colleagues at Union were clearly aware of my upcoming assignment. So as I was entering the library on the morning of January 17, one of my colleagues said to me in passing, “Did you hear? Your school burned down last night.” I thought he was simply making a bad joke. And I must have asked him three times over before I realized that he was relaying actual news to me. When I went into the library, the reference librarian, Dr. Martha Aycock, communicated the same news to me. It was, alas, true. I don’t remember when the gutted building was taken down. But for my first several years at EMS we here on campus lived with an ugly and empty lot at the top of the front lawn, between Northlawn to the North and Lehman Auditorium to the south, before the Campus Center was put up. A huge amount of institutional (and personal!) history went up in flames with the old Ad Building. Thanks for this timely reminder of the building that once and for long years “anchored” the campus of EMC!