| Additional Information: | A 'site file' exists for this property. It contains additional information such as correspondence, newspaper clippings, or historical information. It is a public record and may be viewed in person at the Wisconsin Historical Society, State Historic Preservation Office.
Built as a gymnasium and meeting place for women university students, this building was the scene of Professor Blanche Trilling’s founding of the organization now known as College Women in Sports that governs intramural athletics for college women. Later, Professor Margaret H'Doubler created here the country’s first university dance performance-group, “Orchesis,” and the first degree program in dance, becoming nationally influential in dance education.
The five-story Renaissance Revival building, shaped like a dumbbell, consists of a long central section flanked by projecting pavilions made slightly taller by attic stories. Constructed of Madison sandstone blocks with chiseled surfaces, the structure has a raised basement and a rusticated ground floor. Above this is the three-story-high, red-tile roofed gymnasium, now converted to a dance theater, with tall round-arched windows. French doors open onto small, iron-balustraded balconies supported by stone scrolled brackets.
NAMED FOR JOHN HIRAM LATHROP, 1ST CHANCELLOR.
ORIGINAL COST $190,000. [A].
"Besides the gym there was a concert hall, a stage, a pool, a running track, a kitchen and social rooms, bowling alleys, laundry facilities and a theater. Lathrop Hall was home to the nation's first dance curriculum and, in 1926, the first dance major." "Preserving the Past" Wisconsin State Journal 5/10/1998.
A Historic Structure Report of this building can be found in Room 312 at the Wisconsin Historical Society.
City of Madison, Wisconsin Underrepresented Communities Historic Resource Survey Report:
The University of Wisconsin responded to the surge of women seeking professional and educational opportunities in the Progressive Era by including a women’s gymnasium in the 1908 university master plan. Lathrop Hall, a massive Neoclassical building clad with Madison sandstone, was completed in 1909 and was uniquely designed to meet the needs of campus women that were not being met by existing facilities. The building had meeting rooms, kitchens, a swimming pool, a gymnasium, bowling lanes, a laundry, a cafeteria, reading rooms, and home economics laboratories. It was intended to be the first of a quadrangle of women’s buildings and served as a social hall akin to the male-only student union before Memorial Union was built.
In the 1910s, it hosted offices of the Women’s Self-Government Association and the Women’s Court that adjudicated on-campus disciplinary matters. Academic, social, and athletic clubs for campus women convened in Lathrop Hall. In the early part of the twentieth century, Lathrop Hall was the epicenter of women’s activities on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. It was seen as a meaningful investment in co-education after decades of the discussion by regents on how to make provisions on the campus for the education of women. According to the 1985 National Register Nomination for Lathrop Hall, the hall “is of national significance in the areas of physical education and dance. Built for the Department of Physical Training for Women, Lathrop Hall was the site of the founding of the Athletic Conference of American College Women [in 1917], today the premier organization in the nation governing intramural sports for college women.”
According to the 1985 National Register Nomination, Lathrop Hall was also the location classes were held for the first dance major established in the United States. |
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| Bibliographic References: | [A]. "A TABULAR HISTORY OF THE BUILDINGS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN." ALDEN AUST 1937.
Wisconsin Magazine of History, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Vol. 81, #3, Spring 1998.
Buildings of Wisconsin manuscript.
"Preserving the Past" Wisconsin State Journal 5/10/1998.
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Office of Public Information, University of Wisconsin-Madison Tour Guide: South Campus, 1989.
A Celebration of Architecture: Wisconsin Society of Architects Tour of Significant Architecture, 1979. |
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