Old Main and the Empty University

In the fall of eighteen seventy-six, a handsome three-story building stood on a bare, treeless mesa southeast of town. There were no paths leading to it, no other structures nearby, just grasses and cactus and the long view east across the plains. The building had gas-light fixtures, a ventilation system, and soundproofed floors. It had cost tens of thousands of dollars to construct. And on the day it opened, there was no one inside.

The University of Colorado had been chartered on March fourteenth, eighteen seventy-six, five months before Colorado became a state. The town of Boulder had donated the site, partly from civic pride and partly from a calculation that a university would anchor the town against the boom-and-bust fate of the mining camps. What the founders had not quite resolved was who would attend. Qualified students were scarce in a territory that had barely been settled for two decades.

The doors did not open for instruction until September fifth, eighteen seventy-seven. On that first day, two faculty members welcomed the first small class of students. The building they entered, the one that still anchors the campus, is now called Old Main, and it ranks among the oldest continuously occupied public buildings in Colorado.

The Tuscan Revival sandstone architecture was built to suggest permanence and ambition. The campus that grew around it over the following century leaned into that promise: today it enrolls more than thirty-five thousand students, and the Flatirons serve as a backdrop for every admissions brochure as reliably as Old Main serves as its symbol.