Jerome J. Richardson Hall stands tall in its white, three-story elegance at the end of Wofford Campus Drive and Greene Dormitory marks the keen natural spaces and fresh grass lawns near resource buildings like Daniel and the Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center of Arts.
Unfortunately, their neighboring dormitory, Charles. F. Marsh Hall, does not stand in similar repute.
A campus is meant to be updated. Buildings become older with every generation of Terriers that passes through them, and no buildings take a harder hit than the residential dorms. The tales of breaking ceiling tiles and exit signs are what makes waves across campus, but the ordinary day-to-day activities of students in and of itself is enough to warrant updates every once and while.
“Renovations are a part of what colleges do. We kind of go through cycles of renovating buildings, and it’s Marsh’s turn,” said former Wofford Terrier and Assistant Dean Allen Lollis.
With Greene receiving the most recent update in 2015, Marsh is up for a new look. The plans for renovation include the common area, study rooms, trash rooms and bathroom updates.
A private bathroom, handicap accessible, is in the proposal, as well as seating areas on every floor of the dormonatory. The bottom floor will also have an updated floor plan to have a more efficient layout for students and staff.
“This is another phase of what we’ve been working on in Marsh for a while. For a couple of years, they worked on the guts of the building. The HVAC and those kinds of things,” Lollis said. “Then they worked on the rooms last summer.”
The last phase of renovations will focus on bathrooms and community spaces.
“By the end of the summer, everything in Marsh will have been recently touched, upgraded, renovated, remodeled. Whatever you want to call that – the whole building will be pretty different from when I was a student and from where it was five or six years ago,” Lollis said.
College is more than education. Students are a part of the living community of their school. They go to class together, eat together and live together as they learn who they are in their adult lives.
“Every floor is getting a community area and a community usable room,” Lollis said. “It’s always been the place where we’ve seen in the end of year surveys where the strongest communities come out of. I think this will recommit to that.”
“While the Richardson dorm is very nice, there’s very few differences in what it is like to be an RA here versus in another dorm,” Richardson Hall RA Aidan Jenkins ‘24 said. “The only differences I can think of are the facilities available for me to plan events. For example, if I want to set up a movie or game on the tv in the common room I have that option. If I was in Marsh, however, I wouldn’t be able to set up events located on my hall since they don’t have common rooms on every floor.”
Having accessibility to common areas and standard living spaces offer students, especially first years, a better on-campus experience that can make an impact on their subsequent years at Wofford.
