Eaton Hall

Since we just walked over from Ford Hall, you are starting to get a sense of how this campus operates. Salem is a city driven by a constant cycle of reinvention... tearing down the obsolete, shuffling its institutions around, and ambitiously rebuilding its civic identity. Eaton Hall, completed in 1909, is a perfect monument to that very cycle. It exists primarily because of Abel E. Eaton, a wealthy woolen mill owner who donated fifty thousand dollars. That is roughly one point seven million dollars today. But Abel did not just write a check and walk away. The man was a notorious micromanager. He demanded the building be designed in the heavy, rugged Richardsonian Romanesque style. The architect politely nodded, and then designed a Late Gothic Revival building instead. Eaton was undeterred. He insisted on overseeing the construction himself, enforcing his exacting standards brick by brick. For fifteen years, starting in 1923, this building was the premier center of legal education in the Pacific Northwest. Before the College of Law moved over to Gatke Hall, which we passed a few minutes ago, they earned their official accreditation right inside these walls. And Eaton Hall was a bizarrely effective multitasker. While aspiring lawyers debated torts downstairs, Professor Morton Peck was upstairs running his renowned herbarium. An herbarium is basically a vast archive of dried plant specimens used for scientific research. Peck housed the world's largest collection of Oregon wildflowers right here, meticulously writing his definitive botanical manual directly above the noisy law school. Of course, being the administrative center made it a prime target for student engineering of a less academic sort. In one highly coordinated prank, students hoisted a Ford Model T onto those front steps and hung a sign reading Honest Herb's Used Cars. It was a rather pointed jab at then University President G. Herbert Smith. If you look at the roofline again, those flat turrets used to support towering round spires. But by 1967, gravity and weather had won the battle. The spires became structurally unsound and vastly expensive to maintain. Rather than endlessly repairing them, the university simply dismantled them. They chose pragmatic safety over architectural vanity, forever altering the building's silhouette. Today, Eaton Hall serves the humanities departments, operating Monday through Friday from eight in the morning until five in the evening, and closed on weekends.