If you’ve walked around campus and wondered who a building is named after, you’re not alone.
ASU Media Relations representative Judith Smith has come across other people on campus who don’t recognize a name on one of the several buildings on campus that are named in honor of past university presidents and public figures, and she is working on a project that will help solve that problem.
Her project started approximately 10 years ago.
“I started writing a series about the people who the buildings are named after, and started with Wilson Hall and other buildings, and I found it to be very interesting,” she said. “Then I began to realize that some of this information was something that nobody knew, and then I realized that I better make a complete list, so I’ve been working on that.”
Smith also started working on locations that were smaller, including rooms and facilities such as Montgomery Instructional Lab, which is located inside the Memorial Union.
Smith said she began realizing the importance of the project as she continued working on it.
“I started thinking ‘gosh, if we don’t do something, we’re going to have these buildings and labs named after people and nobody is going to know who they are named after,’” she said.
Smith said she gets information for her project through a number of sources, including university archives, old newspaper articles, and the ASU Foundation. However, some of the information she is looking for is not easily available.
“For some of these stories, I can only find a few sentences,” she said.
However, Smith has found some other interesting facts about ASU that coincide with her project. One example is the ASU carillon, which is a keyboard instrument attached to bells and is now located inside Old Main.
Smith found out about the instrument while looking for sources on Arthur John Matthews, the namesake of the Matthews Center.
“I was looking for references to Matthews and there was an article on the ASU carillon and I said ‘oh, what’s that?’” she said.
Currently, Smith’s naming project is not accessible to the public, but some of the facts and stories she has come across have been published in past articles in the ASU Insight newsletter.
Eventually she would like to see her work compiled into a booklet or a website, Smith said.
“It just gives people a more intimate connection, and some of these stories are very, very interesting,” she said. “It’s for posterity.”
Smith said she hope the project will continue past her time at ASU.
“The next thing I want to do is find some mechanism so that this can continue, so that when I leave ASU it just won’t stop,” she said. “I think that when someone reads this they will be interested in it and will continue it.”
Reach the reporter at katherine.torres@asu.edu
