EXHIBITS
The Built Environment: 130 Years of Growth, Development, and Change on the USU Campus: The Old A.C.
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The Old A.C.
As Utah’s land-grant institution, USU initially promoted vocational skills paired with a liberal education. These skills included agriculture, mechanical arts, and domestic arts. The built environment reflected this mission through the physical presence of agriculture on campus. However, by 1954, an expanding curriculum and student body required relocating the remaining agricultural facilities elsewhere.
Model Barn (1891–1919)
Supplied with the best equipment available, the Model Barn served as an agricultural laboratory where students received hands-on instruction in animal husbandry. Its close proximity to Old Main provoked the student newspaper to complain of “the delightful odors.” In 1919, local tradesmen paid the college $100 to salvage the structure.
Mechanic Arts Building (1897–1984)
Built in 1897, the Mechanic Arts Building housed woodworking, blacksmithing, and mechanics shops. In 1905, a fire destroyed the building, along with many of the college’s early records. Emergency funding enabled the rebuilding and modernization of the structure. As education focuses shifted, a variety of programs, including landscape architecture and communicative disorders, called the MA Building home. Condemned following the 1962 earthquake, the structure nonetheless received continued use until its demolition in 1984.
E. G. Peterson Agricultural Science Building (1957–2010)
Although the on-campus barns relocated in the 1950s, the campus retained its agricultural heritage through the E. G. Peterson Agricultural Science Building. The building opened for classes in 1957 and housed the College of Agriculture along with the Experiment Station and Extension Services until 2010. The facility was demolished in 2012. The construction site of the new Life Sciences Building occupies the location of the former Agricultural Science Building.
