CSU Buildings and Grounds History

College Cafeteria, 1924

From CSU's Sense of Place:  A Campus History of Colorado's Land-Grant University, by James E. Hansen, Gordon A. Hazard, and Linda M. Meyer.  Fort Collins, CO:  Colorado State University, 2018.

Architect – United States Army

Builder – LD Crain supervised the construction

Construction began in the middle of May 1918 and within one month the Dining Hall was opened on the east side of Oval to feed the United States Army soldiers being trained on the campus.  During the summer of 1918, more kitchen equipment was installed to help feed the additional Student Army Training Corps (SATC) students that were about to begin their training at the College.

Commonly called the “Mess Hall” by the students, it was a standard wood-framed military dining hall that cost $28,746.68. It contained a 34’ x 190’ main building with a 45’ x 81’ wing.  Construction workers hired directly by the College built the structure under the guidance of the Building Superintendent.  The labor unions to which the workers belonged patriotically waived their union rules regarding holidays and Sundays so that the project could be completed in the shortest amount of time.

The dining hall could comfortably seat 240 although it was rated as a facility that could seat 500 soldiers.  $14,843.00 was spent on kitchen equipment.  A fully equipped bakery adjoined the kitchen.  It produced the 250 loaves of bread and other baked goods consumed by the diners each day.

When classes started in late September 1918, the dining facility was opened to all students and meals could be purchased for a nominal cost.  In October 1918, a plan was announced that a frost-proof, double walled cement storehouse for vegetables would be built by the soldiers learning to work with cement.  The building connected to the mess hall would be 21’ wide x 50’ long x 12’ high.  The double-wall would have a four-inch air space between the walls to maintain an even temperature in which to store the food.  This support building would stand for the next four decades and become known as “The Biltmore”.

The war ended in November 1918 and the SATC troops departed the campus by the end of that year.  Aggie students began returning from military service in the spring of 1919.  Beginning with the fall semester of 1919, the “College Cafeteria”, as it was now called, was being run by a local contractor and continued to be used as an affordable cafeteria dining facility for the students, faculty, and staff of the College. In the fall of 1920, an addition was built onto the southeast end of the original building.  The interior was remodeled during this same time.

Despite almost being closed during the summer of 1935, the “College Cafeteria” remained open and continued to serve meals until 1939.  It appears to have lost business to the soda fountain and coffee shop in the new Student Union opened in the fall of 1936.  The building stood until May 1940 when it was razed. Materials from this building were used to build the R.O.T.C. Pistol Range building located south of the west Gun Shed.

The new full-service cafeteria in the 1939 addition to the Johnson Hall Student Union had made the older facility obsolete in the eyes of the administration.  Ironically, College administrators were said to have quietly admitted they regretted tearing down this building after the United States entered World War II in December 1941. This old building would have been very handy to have to feed the masses of United States Army soldiers that came to live and study on the campus during 1942 and 1943.

The Dining Hall was the first of several of the “temporary” wooden structures built on the campus.  These were widely used in the first half of the 20^th century to meet the billeting needs of the U.S. Armed Forces.  According to the National Park Service, the U.S. Army Quartermaster General and the Army Corps of Engineers combined to establish five principles used from the outbreak of World War I through the 1950s as the foundation of their mobilization construction plans.  Speed, simplicity, conservation of materials, flexibility, and safety were these principles. They created and issued standard building plans for simple wood-frame structures to be used for a multitude of purposes on a military installation. The buildings were designed to be constructed quickly with inexpensive and prefabricated materials that could be built in assembly-line fashion. The standard plans were bundled into construction packages that could meet the needs of a 125-person company, complete with barracks (with central heating, interior showers and latrines), mess halls, offices, recreation, and supply buildings. Some of the typical elements of these buildings included a long, rectangular shape, a gable roof, use of horizontal wood siding, the use of “aqua medias” or the first story projecting overhang which provided protection from rain, and multi-paned, double-hung windows.  Little or no insulation was used in most locales and often the interior was the frame of the building and back side of the roof and siding boards.  The Dining Hall had its interior lined with smooth panels to better allow for maintaining cleanliness.