Building History

Warren Hall: "The Most Satisfactory Building ... at the College"

With a New York State legislative appropriation of $500,000 in April 1930, the construction of a "new building for Agricultural Economics and Rural Social Organization" for Cornell University's College of Agriculture could begin. Staff and students of the Department of Agricultural Economics, dispersed throughout four different campus locations, would join Rural Sociology colleagues in this new home for the rural social sciences. With commodity prices falling and construction workers eager and anxious for work during the Great Depression, it was an ideal time to build and furnish a new building.

The cornerstone was laid on May 23, 1932, at a ceremony led by Cornell University President Livingston Farrand, Provost Albert R. Mann (former dean of the College of Agriculture), and department heads George F. Warren (Agricultural Economics) and Dwight Sanderson (Rural Sociology). Faculty, staff, and agricultural economics graduate students from 11 countries, including China, South Africa, Albania, and Poland, and 31 U.S. states also took part in the celebration. In his speech that day, Warren concluded with a challenge to his colleagues and the students: "I hope that as the years go by, the contributions through discovery of new truth and through teaching and public service may be as great per square foot of floor space in the new building as they have been in the old ones." Construction was completed later that year.

Typical of the Beaux-Arts style, the building's design consists of three projecting blocks on the south facade, two equidistant from the ends and one centered, each having three bays. The central entrance bay contains a bronze sheathed double door with coupled columns above, in front of the second and third floors. The entire building has a rusticated stone facade on the first floor, with the second floor separated by a white granite beltcourse. Above this, through the second and third floors are smooth granite surfaced walls, with granite coping between the third and fourth floors.

In his annual college report of 1933, Dean Ladd noted that Warren Hall was "...in many ways, the most satisfactory building that has ever been constructed at the college. It is efficiently arranged, well-constructed, and furnished with suitable facilities in every way; and the construction was completed promptly."

The new building quickly became one of the most heavily used classroom buildings on campus and remains so almost 80 years later.

In 1958, an addition connecting Warren Hall and Mann Library was built, closing the northeast corner of the quadrangle.

Adapted from Professor Bernard F. Stanton's book Agricultural Economics at Cornell: A History, 1900-1990. Further history can be found in Stanton's George F. Warren: Farm Economist.