Sub-series J: Williston Hall (built 1857 March-1858), 1857 - 2002

Just two weeks after the fire that destroyed North College (1828-1857), Amherst College Trustees met and accepted Trustee Samuel Williston’s offer of a new building on the same site. Williston proposed a building with fire-proof chemical laboratories, meeting rooms for the literary societies, and a hall for alumni meetings.

In 1874, Professor Richard H. Mather (AC 1857) installed a collection of plaster replicas of Greek and Roman sculpture on the third floor. Mather, the professor of Greek, purchased the statuary in Europe, and saw the College’s first art collection as an educational tool comparable to the existing natural history collections in the Octagon and Appleton Cabinet. The Greek and Latin classrooms on the second floor were similarly filled with art and photographs of Greece and Rome. The cast collection was dispersed by 1935, when the third floor space was transformed into the “Freshman Reading Room,” to provide study space and relieve overcrowding in Converse Memorial Library. The Christian Association, a student organization affiliated with the national YMCA, had rooms on the first floor of the building; student members provided campus tours and information.

After World War 2, Williston Hall was remodeled to expand available classroom and office space, and the stair tower on its north side was removed (the original spire had been replaced in 1877, as it was structurally faulty; the second pyramidal spire was removed in 1925). The location of the tower is still visible today as lighter brick coloring on the north wall of the building. In 2002, Williston Hall was gutted and rebuilt as a dormitory.