Old Main and the Senior Walk

The hill above Fayetteville, the one the first settlers claimed for their spring, the one that looks out over the Ozark ridgelines in three directions, became the site of Arkansas Industrial University in eighteen seventy-one. The school was a land-grant institution, chartered under the Morrill Act of eighteen sixty-two to teach agricultural and mechanical arts alongside classical studies and military tactics. Classes began in eighteen seventy-two with a handful of students and a faculty of modest means.

The building that came to define the campus arrived between eighteen seventy-three and eighteen seventy-five. Old Main was designed in the French Second Empire style by Chicago architect John Mills Van Osdel, slate-gray mansard roof, dormer windows, twin towers that can be seen from the valley below. When construction finished in eighteen seventy-five, Old Main was the largest building in Arkansas.

In June of nineteen seventy, it became the first Fayetteville structure entered on the National Register of Historic Places. The campus grew around Old Main over the decades, but its most quietly remarkable feature lies underfoot. The Senior Walk begins at the front steps of Old Main and winds through more than five miles of campus sidewalks, the names of every graduating class since eighteen seventy-six pressed into the concrete.

The tradition traces to the class of nineteen oh five, who scratched their names into wet cement in front of the building. Later, slabs were added retroactively for the classes before them. Today more than two hundred thousand names are engraved in the walkways, the only tradition of its kind at any university in the country, a kind of democracy of memory, every name the same size, no rank on graduation day.