Preservation Matters! Skidmore College

Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation
Preservation Matters
Samantha Bosshart, Executive Director
August 30, 2012
Skidmore Hall: Where It All Began
With a new a new academic year beginning this week at Skidmore College, it is a fitting time to reflect on the college’s origins in downtown Saratoga Springs.  When I walk to the Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation office at 112 Spring Street, I walk through parts of the original Skidmore College campus.  I am often in awe of the variety of buildings that were acquired and creatively used for residences and classrooms.  Take a moment and imagine what downtown would be like if history had made a different turn in 1961, and the Skidmore Board of Trustees had not accepted the offer made by Texas Instruments founder J. Erik Jonsson to buy the 650-acre Woodlawn Park for a new campus and the campus had remained downtown.
Of this much we can be sure: students would be all over the area east of Congress Park, living in residences and heading to classes in buildings located on Circular Street, Regent Street, Union Avenue, and other streets in the area. When the college broke ground for the new campus in 1963, it owned or rented some 80 buildings, according to Robert Jones, associate professor and chair of economics, and Heather Moore ’08, who have thoroughly documented Skidmore’s downtown campus in their 2007 volume, The Architect of Necessity.  Most of these buildings are still standing and remain a testament to the first 50 years of the college’s history.
Today one of the more obvious remnants of Skidmore’s downtown presence is the four- and five-story structure at the corner of Circular and Spring Streets that still bears the name “Skidmore Hall” over its main entrance, which today is known as the Skidmore Apartments.  Emerson F. Carter and the Reverend Luther F. Beecher constructed the elegant building for a cost of $30,000 establishing the Temple Grove Seminary. The name “Temple Grove” deriving from the church association and the large grove of pine trees on the property.  After nine years, most likely due to the Civil War, the seminary failed.  In 1868 the building was purchased by Charles F. Dowd, an instrumental figure in the adoption of multiple time zones, and his wife, Harriet North Dowd opened the new Temple Grove Seminary. A progressive school, the Seminary offered women courses in such subjects as English and literature, social sciences, mathematics, and foreign languages.
In 1903, three years after the seminary closed, Lucy Skidmore Scribner purchased the Dowd estate for the Young Women’s Industrial Club (YWIC), an enterprise to provide young women skills to support themselves during the winter months when the track, giant hotels, casinos and many restaurants closed. Although Lucy Scribner bought the building in six years earlier, it was not used until 1909. Naming it Skidmore Hall in honor of her parents, she brought the building into service as the Women’s Exchange, a shop where YWIC members could sell items they had sewn, such as aprons and petticoats. In 1911, the YWIC changed its name to the Skidmore School of Arts and began to offer a broader range of courses, including some at the college level designed to train teachers. That required more space, and so Mrs. Scribner built a five-story addition to support teacher training, household arts and science, and commerce and trade.
“Many early memories were made in this building,” write Jones and Moore in The Architect of Necessity. As an example, they offer the Wednesday evening dinners known as ‘Christian Night,’ in which all young women wore white dresses and ate by candlelight before proceeding to meetings of the Christian Association.” The dining room where these dinners took place, they write, “was nationally known as the most beautiful dining room at any American women’s college.”
In 1935, all administrative offices were removed from Skidmore Hall and it was remodeled into a dormitory. By 1940, it was providing housing for the entire senior class – until senior classes became too large in the 1960s. Skidmore Hall is now one of the several original Skidmore College campus buildings that are privately owned by Skidmore Apartments.
Join Linda Trela today for the last Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation Summer Sunday Stroll “A Campus & Queen Annes” which will highlight Skidmore Hall, along with the churches, mansions, and carriage houses that all became part of the original Skidmore campus. The 90-minute tour will begin at 10:30am at the SE Corner of Union Avenue and Circular Street.  Cost is $5 for members; $8 for non-members.  No reservation necessary.
Founded in 1977, the Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation is a private, not-for-profit organization that promotes preservation and enhancement of the architectural, cultural and landscaped heritage of Saratoga Springs.