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More Than Meets The Eye

Learn Some Surprising Facts By Digging Around The Campus

By Craig Burdick ’96 (CLAS), ’01 (ENG)

1. Downhill Huskiing

Horsebarn Hill has provided UConn students and the University community with celebrated sledding for generations. But did you know the University once ran its own ski slope? “Husky Hill” opened on Feb. 7, 1967, with two slopes east of Horsebarn Hill. Complete with ski rentals and lights for night skiing, Husky Hill offered free sessions to students and charged $1 for the general public for more than a decade. Today mountain bikers enjoy the steep terrain of Husky Hill while the remains of rope tows and a warming hut stand as reminders to the short-lived but popular winter hot spot.

2. Moe Knows

Over the years, more than 200 student-athletes have achieved All-American status representing UConn, all but one of them in a single sport. Only a handful of student-athletes in NCAA history are two-sport All- Americans; among them is Meredith “Moe” Morhardt ’59, an All-American goalie in soccer and an outfielder in baseball for the Huskies. He helped lead UConn to the 1957 and 1959 College World Series and a 10-1 record as co-captain of the soccer team in his senior year. Visitors to the Alumni Center’s J. Robert Donnelly Husky Heritage Sports Museum can see a tribute to this one-of-akind Husky.

3. Rock On

In the 1930s, A. P. Marsh of New Britain intended to build a retaining wall on his property made of stones from each of Connecticut’s eight counties and all 48 states that made up the United States at the time. Deciding his collection was worthy of a higher purpose, he donated the stones to the Connecticut Grange, the farming organization that supported Connecticut State College. The Grange members used the stones to erect a tribute to agriculture, dedicating the “Little Stone House” in front of the Congregational Church’s Community House along North Eagleville Road in 1937. A bronze plaque identifies the original 48 state stones, with name plates added later for Alaska and Hawaii.

4. Universe in a Nutshell

The smallest building on the Storrs campus holds secrets of the universe. Built in 1954 for $5,000 on the north bank of Swan Lake along North Eagleville Road, the UConn planetarium was Connecticut’s first. With only 140 planetariums in the world at the time, UConn was at the cutting edge of scientific study when the successful launch of Sputnik in 1957 sparked worldwide interest in space exploration. Now in its 55th year, the planetarium continues to serve UConn students for astronomy labs and special presentations.

5. Uninvited Guests

Ants are notorious picnic spoilers, but army ants play host to uninvited – though not necessarily unwelcome – guests of their own. Often physiological mimics, ant guests can be found in large quantities in UConn’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Amassed over 50 years, the Carl and Marian Rettenmeyer Collection remains one of the largest, most complete ant guest collections in the world, with tens of thousands of pinned specimens, and thousands more preserved in vials of alcohol and on microscope slides.

6. U Scream

While savoring a scoop of Jonathan Supreme, you might think the UConn Dairy Bar makes its ice cream just for you – but for nearly a century our creamery produced all of the milk, cream cheese, sour cream and ice cream for the University and some state agencies. The high cost of deferred maintenance forced the cessation of most creamery operations in 1991, but targeted repairs and improvements brought ice cream back, to the delight of students, alumni and locals. Last year more than 100,000 customers enjoyed 26,154 gallons of ice cream, 1,909 pounds of cheese and 775 gallons of yogurt made right here on campus.

7. Perfect Seasons

While women’s basketball fans continue to celebrate the Huskies’ sixth NCAA championship, most fans would be excused for thinking the perfect 2009 season was the third such season in the program’s history. But the very first perfect UConn women’s basketball season occurred in 1902, not 1995. Nine years after the first women’s collegiate basketball game was played, Connecticut Agricultural College beat the girls of Willimantic High School by scores of 15-6 and 25-6 to finish their debut season with a 2-0 record. While they may not have won every game by double digits like their modern counterparts, the 1902 team’s lockdown defense would have made Hall of Fame coach Geno Auriemma proud.

8. Boo Conn

The University of Connecticut celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2006 and, with many old buildings, the main campus has its share of ghosts. Many former and current residents know of the Civil War soldier and World War II-era nurse haunting Whitney Hall. People have reported breathing difficulties and invisible hands on their shoulders in Eddy room 501. The basement of Gulley Hall may be home to as many as two ghosts: Samantha, who died of a fever in 1782 and whose long-forgotten grave was disturbed when Horticulture Hall (now Gulley Hall) was erected in 1905, and Alfred G. Gulley himself, a professor of horticulture from 1894 until his death in 1917, whose office was in the building since its construction.

9. Puppy Love

The icon of UConn athletics is the Husky, first introduced in 1934 by a vote of students who thought the weather on campus was as cold as the Canadian Yukon. The first mascot, a brown, black and white puppy who arrived in January 1935, was struck and killed by a car shortly after his arrival. His grave lies at the intersection of North Eagleville Road and Route 195. Jonathan II began the tradition of an all-white mascot in the fall of 1935 and famously chased the Brown University bear mascot up a tree before a football game.

10. In with the Old

Horse-drawn carriages, as well as a sleigh, plow, hay rake and tractors from the 1920s survive as evidence of the University’s roots as an agricultural school. The collection of early 20th-century farm equipment can still be seen, complete with the original owner’s manuals, in various buildings around campus, along with a collection of antique reel mowers and historical lawn care machinery tied to UConn’s turfgrass programs.

11. Remains to Be Seen

In a state with history dating back before the founding of the nation, it comes as a surprise that only two major artifacts have been unearthed on the Storrs campus: a Revolutionary War-era cannon ball and a 4,000-year-old Native American spearhead. The cannon ball, found on a farm adjacent to the Plant Science Nursery in the 1970s and now housed at the Mansfield Historical Society, was thought to have fallen off a wagon providing food and artillery for the Continental Army led by Gen. George Washington.

12. Pewter Pan

A wicker wheelchair, a Civil War-era crutch and “George,” one of only five Heart Sound Simulator mannequins in the country, are among the unusual artifacts from the late-18th through mid-20th centuries that belong to the School of Nursing’s Josephine A. Dolan Collection. But the largest – and perhaps most curious – part of the collection consists of more than 25 bedpans, including two distinctive items: a formidable-looking 18th-century pewter bedpan and the “Slipper,” an early- 20th century porcelain pan so named because it could be slipped under the patient and because of its resemblance to footwear.

13. The End

Rarely is a trophy awarded to the loser. Yet in the 1960s, UConn’s School of Pharmacy Dean Harold G. Hewitt and Dean Heber Youngken Jr. of URI started such a tradition with a football bet. The losing team was awarded the “Suppository Trophy,” which read, “The loser gets it in the end.” Division I couldn’t come soon enough.