A HISTORY OF THE DEPARTMENT
by Barbara L. Foster
The College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University was established in 1895 and was comprised of nine “Academic Schools”?: Ancient Languages, Biology, Chemistry and Physics, English, Geology and Mineralogy, History and Political Science, Mathematics, Metaphysics, and Modern Languages. . The student enrollment at WVU during the 1895-1896 academic year was 398, which was 115 more students than the previous academic year. Although tuition was free in the first year of the College of Arts and Sciences, students were required to pay a $5.00 matriculation fee upon entering the University and out-of-state students paid $12.50 per term. General chemistry students paid a laboratory fee of $2.00 and students enrolled in the analytical chemistry laboratory paid a $20.00 laboratory fee. Upon graduation, students paid a diploma fee of $5.00.
The Department of Chemistry at West Virginia University awarded its first undergraduate degrees in 1896. At that time, the science of chemistry was taught in Science Hall which later was renamed Chitwood Hall on the Woodburn Circle. By 1918, the building proved to be inadequate to accommodate the increasing number of chemistry majors. In 1918, WVU President Frank Butler Trotter called for funds to be appropriated for a new building for the Department of Chemistry. World War I had created a heightened interest in chemistry among the general populace and President Trotter predicted that there would be an even greater demand for chemistry graduates after the war. Trotter knew that Science Hall would prove to be inadequate to house a growing enrollment of chemists. The proposed cost of the new building was $400,000. Construction of Chemistry Hall began in 1923. The building was completed in 1925 at a total cost of $750,000, nearly twice the proposed amount.
In 1926, The West Virginia Review stated that “Chemistry Hall is the largest and most complete educational building in West Virginia, standing four stories high and being 254 feet long by 79 feet wide. The building . . . stands out as another step forward in the educational progress of the state of West Virginia.”? President Trotter declared “It is a structure that every West Virginian can feel proud of and boast about as one of the most beautiful and largest of its kind in the entire United States.” In 1968, Chemistry Hall was renamed Clark Hall of Chemistry in honor of Friend Ebenezer Clark (Chemistry Chair from 1919-1947) in recognition of his service to the department and his dedication to the students at WVU. Today, after a major renovation in the 1980s that cost $8.3M, it remains the symbol and the foundation of chemistry in Morgantown and the State of West Virginia. Clark Hall contains six floors and 60,000 square feet of space and houses 15 classrooms, 20 student laboratory rooms with various other instrument and balance rooms, five prep rooms, four chemical storage areas, a hazardous waste room, two media rooms, a Chemistry Learning Center, and various faculty and staff offices.
Today, the Department of Chemistry is one of West Virginia University’s major contributors in the areas of learning and discovery. Employing nearly 100 people (faculty, staff, postdoctoral research associates, and graduate students), the department occupies a 40,000 square foot Chemistry Research Laboratory Building (CRL) as well as the renovated Clark Hall of Chemistry building in which Gene took his courses and resided. A comprehensive department, it awards bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in all fields of modern chemistry. In the Fall of 2003 semester, students took some 12,140 credit hours of instruction in the department. The introductory courses will serve nearly 5700 students majoring in fields from across the University during the 2003-2004 academic year. At the undergraduate level, there are nearly 100 students pursuing degrees in chemistry. With a graduate student population of nearly 60, the department graduates an average of five Ph.D.’s and five M.S.’s per year. In the most recently completed fiscal year, the chemistry faculty garnered $2.25M in federal grants for research in areas ranging from the design and control of wave propagation patterns in chaotic systems to the identification of chemical markers indicative of disease in humans. Last year the department dedicated an NSF funded state-of-the-art Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Facility that will serve researchers across WVU. This year a new NSF funded Fourier Transform Mass Spectrometer system will be installed, enabling researchers to perform state-of-the-art studies in proteomics and related areas of biochemical sciences. The generosity of Gene and Edna has ensured that such accomplishments in chemistry will only grow in the future at WVU.
Chemistry Lab, 1896
