Friendly Hall
Friendly Hall opened in 1893 as the University’s first residence hall and one of the first co-ed residence halls in the country. The University’s fourth building, Friendly Hall was divided in half, with the north entrance for women and the south for men. The living quarters were separated and the sitting rooms downstairs were forbidden to members of the opposite sex, except on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings. The hall became all-male after a year, and remained so until the late 1920s or early 1930s, when the men’s dormitory moved to Straub Hall.
Friendly Hall was designed by William Whidden and Ion Lewis and named after Sam Friendly, a University founder. Whidden trained at Paris’s Ecole des Beaux Arts and was the only architect who trained at this illustrious school to build on the University campus.
Friendly Hall now houses administrative offices for the College of Arts and Sciences and the Deparments of Romance, East Asian, Germanic and Russian Languages.

The University Library
The University Library opened for business
in 1937, ending more than five decades of bouncing the library from Deady Hall to Villard Hall, the Collier House, Friendly Hall and, in 1907, Fenton Hall.
Ellis F. Lawrence designed the original library building, including the prominent north-facing entrance. The fountain in front of the building was originally lined with copper, but the copper was taken in 1942 and used for the war. The walls of the entrance lobbies are made of marbles from France and Italy. The cast stone heads on the building’s cornice, created by former University students, depict Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, John Locke, Thucydides, Buddha, Jesus, Michelangelo, Ludwig von Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Thomas Jefferson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Shakespeare and Dante Alighieri.
The library, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has been expanded on or renovated four times since its opening and is now the largest library facility in Oregon.

Deady Hall
Construction of Deady Hall began in 1873 and was finished in 1876. It is the oldest building on the University campus. In 1977, Deady Hall was named a National Historic Landmark, making it one of four buildings in Oregon designated as such (Villard Hall, its neighbor, is another).
The building was designed by architect William W. Piper, who had no formal professional education and was one of Oregon’s first architects. Piper also designed Portland’s New Market Theater, but Deady Hall was the last building he designed. The 1873 recession and the University’s inability to pay Piper’s fees strained his finances; He later committed suicide by jumping off a train in Wyoming. Deady Hall opened, incomplete, with the University left heavily in debt.
Deady Hall is named after Judge Matthew Deady, president of the state board of regents from 1873 to 1893 and author of the state Constitution and the Oregon Civil Code.
In its long history, Deady Hall has housed a School of Mines, gym, library, YMCA and astronomical observatory. The building now houses classrooms and offices for the University’s math department.
Villard Hall
Villard Hall was the University’s second building. Construction began in 1885 and was finished the next year, a decade after Deady Hall opened. Villard Hall was designed by Warren H. Williams and named after railway builder Henry Villard, the University’s first benefactor. Villard Hall’s superintendent, Lord Nelson (Nels) Roney, built covered bridges in Lane County, the Smeed Hotel and other important Eugene buildings in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
The building was originally built for $25,366 of the
state legislature’s money.
In 1949, architects divided the building’s 1,200-seat, second-floor auditorium horizontally to add a new floor for a radio station, added stairwells and built the Robinson Theatre onto the west side of the building.
Classrooms once filled the first floor and the University president’s office moved there in 1890. In 1946, Villard Hall became known as the “Old Soldiers Home,” because the third floor temporarily housed returning World War II soldiers. The building now houses the theater arts department and the comparative literature program.

– Jared Paben