Look straight ahead for the big, pale stone building with a classic columned entrance and a green-capped cupola on top, sitting up the steps like it knows it’s the main character.
Welcome to Henry Hardin Cherry Hall, one of Western Kentucky University’s signature sights. If you’re standing here long enough, you’ll probably hear it before you leave... the belltower up top. It’s not just decoration: inside that cupola are 25 chimes that ring every fifteen minutes, and on the hour they play a longer tune, which is basically the campus’s way of saying, “You’re late, but we’ll do it in a nice melody.”
Cherry Hall was finished in 1937, built with New Deal-era Public Works Administration funding... a moment when the country was trying to build its way out of hard times. A Louisville architect named Brinton B. Davis drew up the plan. Folks called him “the hill builder,” because he shaped so much of this campus. And this was his showpiece: three floors plus a basement, originally packed with about fifty classrooms, sixteen labs, and sixty offices. It even held the bookstore and the post office... a one-building life system for students who were running on pencils, stamps, and hope.
It’s named for Henry Hardin Cherry, the educator who started the Bowling Green Normal School, the seed that grew into WKU. He died not long after the building was completed... which gives the place a quiet, bittersweet edge.
Today, the labs are gone, turned into more classroom space, and Cherry Hall is home to English, History, Religion, Philosophy, and University Experience... plus the Forensics Team, a serious bunch with serious trophies.
And in 2006, arson damaged the lower floors. Repairs were made, classes were back the next semester, and arrests came the following June.
In 1979, Cherry Hall landed on the National Register of Historic Places. Standing here at the steps, with that belltower watching the time... it’s hard to argue.
