In the late 1970s, my wife and I renovated a 19th-century millworker's home. There were just six small rooms in our simple woodframe house, but as we peeled away layers of paint and plaster, we found ourselves involved in the lives of our forerunners. Real people had lived here-people who liked flowered wallpaper, who stoked wood stoves, who carried water from the common pump and hid whiskey bottles in the outhouse ceiling. They stuffed the cracks with newspapers to keep warm, and, like us, they had bats in the attic. Once they had a fire in the southeast corner of the kitchen. We found charred beams under faded yellow wainscoting (itself found under paneling), new wood put there as our long-departed housemates made a fresh start after the fire.
Once in a while, it's good to get down to the beams, to see where the real structure lies. Yesterday I toured what's left of old Trotter Hall, now a hibernating hulk awaiting its latest incarnation. Every living Swarthmorean knows this revered (and oft-reviled) stone structure. First built in 1882, and added onto in 1895 and 1920, it has no doubt been "improved" countless times in its lifetime. I happened upon hollow, gutted classrooms, where wordless blackboards clung to battered walls, where built-in bookshelves held rubble instead of Rabelais or Ramakrishna. I saw evidence of a fire in Trotter as well-blackened walls and joists, a close call long forgotten, quickly covered as the College moved on.
When all but the bearing walls are gone, you see the past, and the ghosts come out to embrace you. Who's been here? A hundred years of students and teachers, ten thousand classes, a hundred thousand hands raised to ask or answer. The building's namesake, Spencer Trotter, professor of biology and geology from 1888 to 1927, is still here. Surely he knew President Frank Aydelotte, who knew Professor of Economics Frank Pierson '34, who taught Economics major Jerome Kohlberg '46, who in his quiet way has helped us come full circle.
Today we have a magnificent new building on campus (see page 10), just as they did in 1882. Kohlberg Hall is yet another vote for Swarthmore's future, a token of confidence that this great educational enterprise will prosper and endure. I'm sure that a hundred years from now, when it too needs a renovation, the chain of teaching and learning will still be unbroken. I like being a part of this kind of optimism, as the people of this College make a history of their own.
-Jeffrey Lott
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