Sunken Garden

Many of the improvements in the late 1920s and 1930s related to landscaping the campus. In February, 1934, in leveling the campus preparatory to the planting of shrubs and flowers, student workers completed the task of filling in the large sunken area in front of Mooney Hall with dirt from “the large pile thrown up by contractors when Mooney Hall was built and from the site directly back of the Hall where the faculty garages” were to be constructed. They dumped part of the refuse from the construction into the ravine on the east side of the campus. “This ravine has been an eyesore to an otherwise beautiful campus through all the years… a very unattractive back yard”. They also sodded in around Mooney Hall and built “gracefully curved walks of stone on the southeast campus”.

In the fall of 1935, as a continuance of the landscaping project in front of Mooney Hall, workers constructed a large sunken garden. In the center of the garden was a fountain of native field stone surrounded by a lily pool and a flagstone walk. Other flagstone walks provided easy access to the pool. Workers constructed benches to be placed around the pool and resodded the banks sloping down into the garden. Under the supervision of Horace Littlejohn, this work was financed by the Local Relief Work of the Federal Government and was completed in the spring of 1936. The garden and pool became a site of restful meditation, romantic interludes, and rowdy freshman hazing.