Eumenean Hall
(ca. 1849)
The home of one of two historic Davidson College student organizations, the Eumenean Hall was an early center of student life at the College.
214 N Main St, Davidson, NC 28036
From the earliest days of Davidson College until the turn of the twentieth century, student life and government at the College centered around two debating societies, the Eumenean and Philanthropic Societies. The Eumenean Society organized first, on April 14, 1837, just two years after the March 12, 1835, vote by the Concord Presbytery to establish the school. Founded originally as the Polemic Debating Society, the organization assumed its present name in 1838. For several years, the group met in campus classrooms.
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Secret and formal in nature, both the Eumenean and Philanthropic Societies were primarily debating organizations, but both also maintained strict rules governing the behavior of their members, imposing fines for fighting, swearing, intoxication, and "lying to the faculty." Because nearly all Davidson students were members of one society or the other, the societies factored prominently in the daily life of the College. Both provided extensive libraries (the Eumenean Society owned 1,200 volumes at the time its hall was completed) and, until 1913, participated in the selection and payment of the commencement speakers.
On November 12, 1842, the members of the Eumenean Society voted unanimously to construct their own “Society Hall" for meetings and activities. A committee from the Philanthropic Society, who also wished to build a hall, met with the Eumeneans to confer about the design of the two buildings. The groups agreed that the halls should be “alike in site, material, and magnificence.” Construction on the Greek Revival styled halls began shortly after selection of the sites on December 14, 1848, under the supervision of contractors Daniel Alexander and Lewis Dinkins (who also built the Helper Hotel building across Statesville Road from the campus during his work on Eumenean Hall). The two halls were designed to complete the open-ended quadrangle plan of the school’s campus. Their forms and positions at the ends of the quadrangle, with one-story dormitory "rows" between them and the axial Chapel, give the campus an arrangement similar to the more elaborate quadrangle at the University of Virginia, designed by Thomas Jefferson.
Eumenean Hall – completed at a cost of $2,500 – was the first to be dedicated, in November 1849. Among the members initiated into the Eumeneans over the years was Davidson freshman Thomas Woodrow Wilson on October 4, 1873, who would go on to serve as president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. Toward the end of the nineteenth century and increasingly in the twentieth, the dominance of the debating societies began to wane, as evidenced by the student body’s 1895 decision to change the school’s official colors from pink and blue (the traditional colors of Eumenean and Philanthropic, respectively) to crimson and black as Davidson College's official colors. By 1920, the membership of the two societies included only thirty-five percent of the College’s total student population. Although no longer predominant in student life, both groups continue as literary societies, using their original halls and providing a link with the early years of Davidson College.