The Online Tour: A Collaborative Effort

The impetus for this web site was a book by Lisa Jacobs and Dan LeBlond of EMU's Historic Preservation program, whose project is chronicled below. The content of the Virtual Tour section - the information about the campus and buildings - is entirely theirs. Much of the rest of the site's content (buildings that no longer exist; historic moments; EMU presidents) was culled from archival documents and from Eastern Michigan University: A Sesquicentennial Portrait by Smith and Heaton (1999).

This web site itself was the collaborative effort of Swetha Mandava, an EMU graduate student, and Rhonda DeLong, EMU director of Web Communications.

Tour Authors

Lisa Jacobs
Dan LeBlond

"When we first visited EMU to start our graduate studies in Historic Preservation, we were overwhelmed by the size of the campus and daunted by the seemingly uniform rectangular brick buildings on campus. It took several weeks of exploring before we began to notice the variety that these buildings actually exhibit. As we spent our days on campus we began to wonder about the buildings that formed our daily round. When and why were they built? What do they say about the university that produced them? Who has studied here before us? We hope by writing this walking tour not only to answer these questions for ourselves, but also to share the knowledge with others who may be equally curious about the surroundings.

This book can be used both as a walking tour guidebook and as a reference for information on buildings on campus. The entire walk takes approximately 2 hours. For those who do not wish to take the full walk, we hope that you will use the book to answer questions about buildings that you see as you walk around campus.

We hope you enjoy this book and find it useful in understanding Eastern Michigan University. Enjoy and bon voyage! "

Acknowledgements:

"This book would have been impossible without the substantial contributions of a number of people to this project. The initial impetus for a walking tour of Eastern Michigan University came from Preservation Eastern's annual project. Preservation Eastern, the student organization for the graduate program in Historic Preservation, spent a year gathering general descriptions of a number of buildings on campus and compiling general resources on the campus. The authors began their research from this information and then branched out to the clip files at the Halle Library archives.

The University Archives, located in the Halle Library at Eastern Michigan Library, maintains valuable clip files on each of the buildings on campus. Our special thanks goes to Maria Davis, Archival Assistant, who has worked in the EMU library system for over thirty-five years. Not only does she know the archives' collection well, but she also could remember when a number of the more recent changes took place on campus. We would like to thank Mrs. Davis in particular for editing the drafts of this tour and checking it for accuracy.

We would also like to thank Dr. Robert Mancell for reading and commenting on our drafts. Dr. Mancell has studied and worked at Eastern Michigan for almost fifty years, first as a student at Roosevelt School and later as a professor of geography in the Department of Geography and Geology. His invaluable anecdotes and his memory of almost half a century on the campus has added depth to our tour and filled in gaps left by the newspaper files at the University Archives.

Finally, we would like to thank Dr. Ted Ligibel, Director of the Historic Preservation Program in the Department of Geography and Geology. His oversight and support has been instrumental in providing the inspiration for a walking tour of Eastern Michigan University and in bringing the present volume to the public eye."