News
Gross Halls turns 50 this school year
Scott Wagar
07/31/2012
As Dakota College at Bottineau prepares to open it’s residential halls 18 days from now, one of the dormitories will have a reason to celebrate, because Gross Hall turns 50 starting in September.
When it comes to Gross Hall, it holds a number of interesting facts. From being the first progressive dorm in the State of North Dakota, to holding a variety of names, to being designed with one of the most unique architectural designs of its time. Gross Hall, in its everyday appearance, has a rare and exceptional history.
Ground was broken for the Gross Hall in the summer of 1961. John R. Erickson, the state treasurer and chair of the Teachers Insurance and Retirement Fund and Investment Board, placed the first brick on the foundation of the building on Sept. 13, 1961.
Bottineau native, Frank Simek, was the general contractor for Gross Hall. The dormitory, which costed $250,000 to construct, was a modern two-story style building that symbolized an efficient and ultra-convenient edifice, which was a rather new style of architecture at that time, making the dorm very inimitable to other college residences throughout the state.
Perhaps one of the most interesting facts of Gross Hall, considering it has been a girl’s dormitory for a number of decades, is that when the residential hall was constructed in the early 1960s it became the first dorm in the history of North Dakota colleges to be a co-educational, housing both men and women, something that was unheard during that era in North Dakota society. Although bold for its period, the design for the co-ed dorm didn’t place men and women on the same floors. Instead, it housed the men on one floor of the facility and the women on the other, with each having an outer entrance to each floor of the building.
Naming the hall became an epic story in itself, too. When it first opened on Sept. 4, 1963, the resident hall was simply known as the East Dorm, because the building was constructed on the east side of the campus.
Shortly there after, the students had some fun and started calling it Hovind Hall, which was the first dormitory on the college campus, which opened in 1919 and was razed in 1963. Considering Hovind Hall was a women’s dormitory from 1919 to 1932, and then a men’s dorm from 1932 until the early 1960s, students nicknaming the co-ed dorm “Hovind Hall” was quite appropriate considering both men and women lived in the residential hall. The students went as far as taking the signage from Hovind Hall as it was being razed, and placed it in front of Gross Hall.
However, the college administration officially named the building that year Gross Hall after Joseph P. Gross, who was an instructor of the humanities at Dakota College at Bottineau from 1946 to 1962. During his tenure, Gross was the dean of the English Department and instructed such courses as language, philosophy and religion.
Although Gross Hall started out as a co-educational hall, it eventually became a women’s dormitory, which is the current status of the residency today.
In over half a century, Gross Hall has housed thousands of students and holds a variety of appealing stories, and perhaps even some urban legions like most college dorms do; but, it is a distinctive dorm for not only its history, but more so because it housed students which enable them to gain an education, learn social interaction and improve their lives for the future.