Building the Ivory Tower. LaDale C. Winling
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of the Ball homes at Minnetrista; and industrial plants, including expansion of the Ball Brothers manufacturing plant.67 Kibele was brought aboard to impose order on the campus. The college had averted the chaos that could have erupted around the bankrupt normal school, and Kibele’s hire ensured the grounds and buildings would have the classic Vitruvian features of firmness, commodity, and delight (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Ball Gymnasium. The Balls’ donation of several hundred thousand dollars helped give the university its first major athletics building. Muncie architect Cuno Kibele designed the gymnasium and continued his signature style that ran through many Ball-financed projects. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
Conservative forms molded BTC campus planning. Kibele provided a plan of development in 1921 featuring a partially enclosed lawn on a north–south axis, surrounded by a symmetrical quadrangle of buildings. The influence of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris dominated American architecture—training that emphasized grand, monumental designs and adaptations of classical and Renaissance architectural and planning principles.68 A generation of Beaux-Arts architects had employed this spatial arrangement in cities and on college campuses. They drew on the Columbian Exposition of 1893 that crystallized and popularized Beaux-Arts planning and design in the United States.69
BTC leaders traveled to Chicago for inspiration. The master planning committee included Frank Ball, administrators W. W. Parsons and Linnaeus Hines, and a pair of other trustees. They visited Northwestern University in Evanston, just north of the city, and the University of Chicago on the South Side, where the Columbian Exposition had been held. The committee was impressed with Chicago and loosely adopted that city’s university as their campus model. The institution was a national leader in research and civic engagement. Kibele’s designs had established an architectural association between the college and the city’s leading manufacturers and businessmen. Ball State leaders also emulated the works of the country’s leading philanthropists, architects, and education institutions, making visible and tactile the alliance among business, civic, and education leaders.
Institutional Growth
After a decade as a public institution, BTC had solidified its position as a branch campus of ISNS, but Muncie boosters and politicos were determined it would be more than that. Lemuel Pittenger was a lawmaker and educator who held a long affiliation with the Ball family, playing an important legislative role in the development of the BTC campus. Pittenger followed Charles McGonagle’s legacy when he became the Muncie state representative in the early 1920s and served as chair of the Ways and Means Committee for the Indiana State House, handling the state budget in the lower chamber. He helped BTC achieve independence from ISNS by developing separate budget appropriations for the Muncie institution, effectively ending Terre Haute’s control over the junior campus.70 When the president of BTC died suddenly in 1927, students led a successful campaign to have Pittenger named his successor.71 With the Ball brothers’ blessing, Pittenger served as president for fifteen years, continuing as an ally to the family.72
By 1925, enrollment at the college had nearly reached a thousand students, only sixty of whom could live on campus in the lone, wood-framed Forest Hall for women.73 The Ball family addressed the problem, donating $300,000 for construction of a women’s dormitory in honor of their late sister.74 Lucina Hall was a Tudor Gothic brick-and-limestone structure designed by Indianapolis architect George Schreiber. Along with the administration building, the new dormitory served as the southern edge of the quadrangle. Housing over eighty students, it doubled the capacity of the college to house women students on campus. The measure, of course, expanded the reach of Grace DeHority and other college administrators to control the social lives of female students (Figure 6).75
Figure 6. Aerial view of the Ball Teachers College campus, ca. 1929. Several buildings begin to give form to the campus quadrangle. Aside from a handful of homes located north of the university, acres of open land extend into the distance. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
In the final phase of building in the 1920s, the college abandoned the formula of private capital and public operational expenses in favor of wholly public expenditures, creating a new laboratory school directed by the college and the Muncie school district. BTC administrators lobbied the state for appropriations for the school, which would provide progressive education for Muncie students from kindergarten through senior high school. It also gave future teachers opportunities for the practice teaching required in the college curriculum. BTC leaders arranged with Muncie school officials to close a nearby grade school and have the new Burris School serve the population of northwestern Muncie, beginning in 1929.76 The lab school, which drew on the ideas of education reformer John Dewey, was located on University Avenue, just across from Lucina Hall at the edge of BTC’s campus. The school soon earned a reputation as the city’s best.
College officials battled charges that Burris served only the wealthy business class. The new construction of the school, its excellent reputation, and the geographic district boundaries meant that professional-class families locating in northwestern Muncie could provide their children the city’s best education on the public dime, right in the neighborhood where their business colleagues lived.77 The school’s first principal noted the Burris School also aided a group of poor rural families living in “Pigeon Roost,” an undeveloped area beyond the college, and characterized the sons and daughters of Muncie’s professional class as “average” and “typical” students; and, moreover, all would benefit from his strict discipline.78
The Gravity of Capital
When Burris attracted upper-middle-class families to the district, they wanted homes and neighborhoods as good or better than the ones they had left. Many came from the East End, the desirable enclave near the city’s downtown that business elites had established before the turn of the century. The community was not so deeply rooted, however, that it could not be transplanted according to the Ball family’s designs. The Lynds commented on the shifting geography of real estate in their 1937 follow-up study of Muncie, Middletown in Transition, asserting that the Ball family had “moved the residential heart of the city.”79 Where the elite section had been on the city’s east side, later, “the aristocratic old East End, the fine residential section in the pre-motor period when it was an asset to live ‘close in’ and even in the early 1920s, runs a lame second to the two new [Ball] subdivisions in the West End, to which ambitious matrons of the city are removing their families.” The Lynds, who had been friendly with the Balls during their stay in Muncie, connected the growth of the new subdivisions to the family’s involvement with BTC and the college’s transformation “into a cluster of beautiful buildings” as well as “the new million-and-a-half-dollar hospital, an outright gift to the city by the [Ball] family.”80
Figure 7. E. A. Ball House, Westwood. A second-generation Ball family member developed two exclusive subdivisions at the edge of Ball Teachers College. His own home was among the finest and helped draw the Muncie business class to live in the northwestern area of the city rather than in the East End, which had been the traditional businessmen’s enclave. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
The two new West End subdivisions were the work of Edmund Arthur Ball, Frank Ball’s son. He bought a large tract of agricultural land north of the college campus in 1923.81 Ball and a partner, Charles V. Bender, platted out a residential subdivision called Westwood. Ball built his own home there, where he lived with his wife