Chris Kraft: Oral History of an Aerospace Pioneer

Virginia Tech is proud to be the alma mater to many pioneers in aerospace engineering, perhaps none as famous as Christopher Columbus Kraft, Jr. The VT Stories team recorded an oral history interview with Kraft in April 2017, and Special Collections now has the full interview and transcript available online. The VT Stories summary of the interview is available here.

Chris Kraft being interviewed by VT Stories project director Ren Harman at his home in Houston

Chris Kraft graduated from Tech in 1944 with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering. The university was operating on a 12-month schedule because of WWII, therefore Kraft graduated after only three years. Despite only this truncated time at Virginia Tech, Kraft rose through the ranks to become president of the Corps of Cadets, which he counts as teaching him important leadership skills. Kraft also recounts his classes with Professor Rasche, contracting Scarlet Fever, and dance weekends from his memories at Virginia Tech in his interview.

After graduating at age 20, he joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the predecessor organization to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Kraft worked at Langley Research Center as a flight test engineer for 13 years, until the space race began.

Kraft works at his console inside the Flight Control area of the Mercury Control Center, from Wikimedia Commons

In 1958, he became one of the original members of the NASA Space Task Group, which was established to manage Project Mercury, the nation’s first project to put a man in space. During Project Mercury, Kraft developed many of the basic mission and flight control techniques used in manned space flight, which culminated in the creation of the Mission Control Center at the Johnson Space Center (originally the Manned Spacecraft Center) in Houston, from which all of NASA’s manned space flights have been conducted. He also served as Flight Director for all the Mercury missions and many of the Gemini missions. Kraft was named deputy director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in 1970, and later director in 1972. He retired from NASA in 1982 and and subsequently served as a consultant for various corporations. In 2001, Kraft’s autobiography, Flight: My Life in Mission Control was published.

Special Collections also has Kraft’s papers, which he donated in 1986. The collection consists of approximately 28 cu. ft. of manuscripts, particularly NACA and NASA reports and documents, meeting notes and agendas, research materials, and the manuscript for 2001 Kraft’s autobiography. You can view the finding aid for this collection here.

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Illustrations from a Magnificent Character

Recently added online are a collection of illustrations by Lucy Herndon Crockett, a successful author and illustrator from Southwest Virginia’s Smyth county. Lucy authored nine books during her lifetime, the most well-known being “The Magnificent Bastards” in 1954, about her experiences with the U.S. Marine Corps in the South Pacific during World War II. In 1956, it was adapted by Paramount Pictures into an Oscar-nominated film “The Proud and the Profane,” starring Deborah Kerr and William Holden. In addition to her writing career, Lucy lead a very interesting life. 

Movie Poster from Paramount Pictures’ ‘The Proud and the Profane,’ 1956, adapted from Crockett’s book ‘The Magnificent Bastards’

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1914, Lucy spent most of her childhood on various military bases around the world, including Venezuela and Switzerland. After high school, she accompanied her father while he served as advisor to Governor General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., who was overseeing both Puerto Rico and the Philippine Islands. During World War II, she served a five year tour of duty with the Red Cross in New Caledonia, Guadalcanal, the Philippines, Japan and Korea.

It was this time period that inspired much of the material for her books, including ‘Teru: A Tale of Yokohama,’ for which we have the original illustrations. Her passionate personality and strong sense of duty comes through in many of her characters. Interviewers described Lucy as a lady who “seemed too gentle for the ugliness she described” in her writings. In her book ‘The Magnificent Bastards,’ she said “The theme of my book actually is how each person has a breaking point, and if you are lucky in life you are not put to it. In my book I say it is frightening how we can never anticipate how we will react under strain, and my book is about strain.” When asked why she got into the war, she said that “war, horrible as it is, is an experience that some people cannot resist participating in if they possibly can. With me, I am sure a sense of duty is wrapped up in it.”

Illustration from Terru: A Tale of Yokohama

In 1947, Lucy retired from the Red Cross and settled in Southwest Virginia. Her creative pursuits, many travels and strong opinions made Lucy a well-known eccentric character in Seven Mile Ford, where she lived most of her adult life in a historic 22-room house called ‘The Ford.’ Alongside her mother Nell, Lucy ran a gift shop out of the house called “The Wilderness Road Trading Post.” The shop featured her books, illustrations, paintings, decoupage and hand-hooked rugs. She designed the rug patterns which were then executed by local craftsmen.

Illustration from Terru: A Tale of Yokohama

Over the years, Lucy became increasingly eccentric and paranoid of those around her; at one point, threatening behavior toward then President John Kennedy led to a period of house arrest. She was known to write many letters to local newspaper editors. One of Lucy’s most interesting letters detailed her objection to a landfill being built just north of Seven Mile Ford, near the Middle Fork of the Holston River. She described county officials as “displaying an ape-like display of leadership genius” in proposing to “turn this heavenly segment of landscape into a dump.” She argued that the site instead be turned into a resort that would attract tourists. She even suggested a name the project-“Cayetana,” after a friend of hers, Cayetana Alba, the “Duchess of Alba, grandee of Spain.” According to Lucy, the Duchess and her friends were “enthusiastically prepared to sponsor this project.”

Lucy Herndon Crockett died in 2002. The closing paragraph of her obituary best describes her character. She “always had people who were willing to try to help her. Perhaps they were drawn to her complex personality, her prominent possessions or her seeming helplessness. A caregiver who may have known her best at the end of her life described her as kind, loving, generous, selfish, fearful, distrusting and confused. Ironically, these are the same universal emotions which she so skillfully wove into her characters in her best known book, The Magnificent Bastards.”

 

And Lift Off! Highlights of the Michael Collins collection are now online!

Photograph of the Agena target vehicle rocket launch for the NASA Gemini 10 Mission, 1966 Link

Occasionally I get the chance to work with something in our collections that give me shivers, and the notebooks that astronaut Michael Collins used on the NASA Gemini and Apollo spaceflight missions definitely fall into that category. I mean, it isn’t often that you get to handle and scan items that have actually been in space! You can see the online collection here.

Michael Collins is probably most famous for his role as the command module pilot on the Apollo 11 Mission, the first manned mission to land on the lunar surface. Collins orbited the moon while commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin descended to its surface.

Excerpt from Collins’ training notebook for the Apollo 11 Mission, diagramming his lunar landing flight maneuver See notebook 

In 1989, Virginia Tech Special Collections was honored to receive his papers, which cover Collins’ Air Force career, training at the U. S. Test Pilot School and Experimental Flight Center, participation in NASA’s Gemini and Apollo programs, and tenure at the State Department and NASM. While this collection has been heavily used by students and researchers for many years, it wasn’t until this past summer and fall of 2016 that we were able to get a large portion of it scanned and ready to go online. I’m really excited to get some of these items out there for the wider world to see.

Before the Apollo missions, Collins was also involved in the Gemini missions, serving as pilot of Gemini 10, launched July 18, 1966. During this mission, Collins and commander John Young set a new orbital altitude record and completed a successful rendezvous with a separate orbiting space vehicle, paving the way for modern day space vehicle maneuvers such as docking with the International Space Station. Another notable achievement from this mission was the successful completion of two spacewalks by Collins. Collins was the was fourth person ever to perform a spacewalk (referred to by NASA as an EVA, or Extravehicular Activity), and the first person to ever perform more than one. 

Excerpt from the Apollo 11 onboard transcript, showing the moment Armstrong landed the spacecraft on the moon, 1969 See the transcript

 

In the process of docking with the Agena target during the Gemini 10 mission, 1966

After retiring from the NASA astronaut program in 1970, Collins worked for the US State Department and the Smithsonian Institute, serving as the first director of the National Air and Space Museum. The collection also includes many items related to his later work, as well as many items sent to him by adoring fans and space enthusiasts from around the world. What’s now online is just a portion of the collection, hopefully we’ll be able to get more up soon. You can see the finding aid for the collection here.

Collins during training for the Gemini 10 mission, 1966 link

Capturing Virginia Tech’s past through VT Stories

Although we have a lot of important records and collections in the university archives that document Virginia Tech’s past, there are still countless stories, traditions and experiences that have never been recorded. But these personal stories are just as important to understanding our history as any document from the President’s office or the Office of Student Affairs. And that’s where the VT Stories project comes in.

Since 2015, a team of current students and faculty have been recording oral history interviews with Virginia Tech alumni, capturing the stories and experiences of VT students from the 1940s all the way up through the past decade. The goal behind this project is to promote engagement between older Hokies and newer Hokies, with current students interviewing alumni to learn their history and make mentoring connections, in addition to sharing and preserving stories from Virginia Tech’s past that may otherwise be lost.

With the public launch of VTstories.org this month, I thought I’d share a little bit about the project and Special Collections’ role. The project was started in 2015 by the President’s Office and is managed by faculty and staff in History, English, TLOS, the Alumni Association, and us here in Special Collections. After the interviews are recorded by the VT Stories team, fully transcribed by a professional transcription service, reviewed by the interviewees, and permissions are granted to share the stories with the public, the master files and documents are deposited in Special Collections. As the completed oral histories trickle in, the full audio and transcripts are uploaded to VT Special Collections Online, where they are available for listening in their entirety.

Lisa Ellison, Class of 1986, listen to her story here

A lot of the technical skills and workflows that we developed for the VT LGBTQ Oral History Project  are being used for the VT Stories project, including the use of the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer  developed by the University of Kentucky. A good thing too; with over 60 interviews already recorded, and many more planned, it helps having a blueprint for managing an oral history project this big already in place.

Just a handful of the interviews are available online so far, with many more to come in the next few months. In addition to the full audio and transcripts available on our site, VTstories.org features sound clips, photos and write-ups on the interviewees, plus more information about the project and its participants. Check it out!

Hitting on a Girl, Civil War Style

I love stumbling across letters in our collections that offer a glimpse of everyday romance. It’s something we can all relate to. So I when I came across a letter while digitizing a collection from a Confederate soldier confessing his feelings of “something more than friendship, far exceeding gratitude,” I was excited to share.

The letter, found in the Koontz Family Papers, was written by Angus Ridgill, a private from Alabama, to Nellie Koontz, a young woman living in the Shenandoah Valley, in August, 1863. The letter was ostensibly written as a thankyou note to Nellie and her family for housing him recently as a lone soldier, but Angus also uses the opportunity to confess his infatuation with her.

First page of Angus Ridgill’s letter to Nellie Koontz, dated August 17, 1863. See it online here

He writes:

“I am naturally a creature of impulses, and the first few moments I passed in your company was sufficient to make me entirely subservient to your will, be that what it may.”

He continues with assurances that this confession was not his original intention of the letter, that he doesn’t expect his feelings to be fully reciprocated, and can only wait for an appropriate response-

“still I do trust that you will allow me time and opportunity to prove anything which you may wish to know…”

He finishes with an apology:

“if all this time I have been presuming too much upon your former kindness I most humbly ask your pardon, hoping at the same time that I have not forfeited your friendship.”

Whether Angus ever received a response from Nellie is not known. But seeing as this letter was not immediately torn to shreds, but instead, carefully saved alongside those from her brothers and cousin (who were also off fighting for the Confederacy), we can assume his message had some significance to her.

An ‘A.G. Ridgill’ is listed as a private in the Washington Battalion, Louisiana Artillery, and in the 1870 census, Angus Ridgill is listed as age 24, making him only 16 or 17 when he wrote this letter. In the 1860 U.S. Census, Ellen F. ‘Nellie’ Koontz was listed as 16 years old, making her 19 in 1863 at the time of this letter. I guess this proves teenage love messages were alive and well 150 years ago, just with more cursive and less emojis.

Sadly, census records also tell us that Angus and Nellie didn’t end up together. In the 1880 census, A.G. Ridgill, now 33, is listed as living in Van Zandt, Texas, working as a farmer and married to an Elizabeth, age 29. Also living with him is an 8 year old step son, and two daughters, ages 5 and 3. In the same year Nellie, now listed as Nellie F. McCann, is married to N.F. McCann, an editor, and also has a son, 8, and two daughters, ages 4 and 2.  Hopefully they both found true love with their respective spouses and were happy with their marriages and families at this stage in their lives.

In addition to this letter, the Koontz Family Papers contains correspondence from brothers George and Milton Koontz and their cousin George Miller, each of whom served in the Confederate armies of Virginia. The collection also includes letters sent from other friends and two diaries and a sketchbook from Milton Koontz. The entirety of this collection is now online, including transcripts. Take a look at the collection here.

 

The Art and Travels of Sigrid Rupp

When she wasn’t designing offices for Silicon Valley giants like Apple and IBM, Sigrid Rupp was busy traveling around the world, writing and sketching the scenes that caught her eye. From 1966 to 2003, she visited over 30 countries, traveling extensively throughout North America, Europe, and East Asia. With an eye for design in environments both natural and built, she meticulously documented her many travels in photographs, diaries and sketchbooks. Maybe a little different from the typical contents in our many collections that form the International Archive of Women in Architecture, but I think they help show who Sigrid Rupp was- always curious, always creating.

Sigrid Rupp sketching the view from an overlook in Guanjuato, Mexico.

Rupp developed her fascination with architecture and the built environment as a child growing up in post-war Germany in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Much of Europe was in the process of rebuilding from the devastation of World War II, and Rupp got to witness first-hand how modern architecture and urban planning could transform communities. At age 10 she moved with her family to California, and at 17 she enrolled at UC Berkeley to study architecture. In 1976, 5 years after receiving her architectural license, she founded her own firm, SLR Architects, in the San Francisco bay area, where she served as president until she closed the office in 1998.

An excerpt from one of Rupp’s travel diaries, complete with a view out her tent on a lake in Alaska in 2002.

Rupp traveled and sketched extensively throughout her career, but after her retirement, she devoted more time to travels and to watercolor painting. Her watercolors of bay area landscapes were featured in several juried shows of the Pacific Art League of Palo Alto. She also began hosting a rotating art show at the Ravenswood Medical Clinic in East Palo Alto, where she had previously worked as project architect.

Architectural details of La Paroquia in San Miguel Allende, Mexico

Rupp’s sketch of a yurt during her visit to Mongolia in 2000

Rupp kept traveling and sketching until late 2003, when she was diagnosed with gastric cancer. After a six month battle, she passed away on May 27th, 2004, at age 61. In her obituary, her family writes that she was “was the life of the party at family functions where she told stories from her extensive travels and loved her champagne.” Though her adventures were cut short, her passion for seeing the world lives on in her travel diaries and sketchbooks, which can be seen in full in our reading room. The finding aid for the Sigrid Rupp Collection contains an extensive list of all the sketches, photographs and recollections from her travels. You can see a small sampling of items from her collection, including some of these drawings, on our IAWA digital collections site. Happy travels!

If Thou Hast Crushed a Flower

One of my favorite parts of working in Special Collections is that I’m always coming across something beautiful and unexpected that I never knew we had. Case in point: the Daniel Bedinger Lucas scrapbook. Opening the average looking notebook cover reveals page after page of intricate pressed flower arrangements surrounded by handwritten poetry and and prose. There’s even a few locks of hair delicately woven and stitched into some of the pages. What’s unexpected is how vibrant most of the flowers still look- it’s really hard to believe they were picked some 150 years ago. Despite being so delicate, most of the arrangements have held up exceptionally well.

 

So who was the man behind this beautiful book? Daniel Bedinger Lucas was born March 16, 1836, at “Rion Hall” in Charleston, Virginia (now West Virginia). He attended the University of Virginia, and then studied law under Judge John W. Brockenbrough of Lexington, Virginia. In 1859 he began practicing law at Charleston but moved the next year to Richmond. The scrapbook was compiled some time during this period in the early 1860s, when Lucas was working as a lawyer in Richmond.
At the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 he joined the staff of General Henry A. Wise and took part in the Kanawha Valley campaign, but his physical disability from a childhood spine injury kept him from active service in the last years of the war. Toward the end of the war he ran the blockade to defend his friend John Yates Beall, accused of being a Confederate spy, but was unable to defend him against the charges. Beall was executed on Governors Island, New York.

Barred from the practice of law until 1871, due to restrictions on the service of ex-Confederates, Lucas turned to literature and became co-editor of the Baltimore Southern Metropolis. At this point his writing became more than just a hobby, and many of his poems were published in this magazine. Lucas’s volumes of poetry include The Wreath of Eglantine (1869) and Ballads and Madrigals (1884). He wrote three plays about the Civil War. His books include The Memoir of John Yates Beall (1865) and Nicaragua, War of the Filibusters (1896). He was known as the “poet of the Shenandoah Valley.”

In 1869, Lucas married Lena Tucker Brooke, of Richmond. Their only child, Virginia, was born in 1873. He reentered the practice of law in 1871 and took a prominent role in the Democratic party politics of West Virginia, acting as Democratic elector in the elections of 1872 and 1876, to the legislature in 1884 and 1886, and as a member of the supreme court of appeals from 1889 to 1893. He died at Rion Hall in Charleston on June 24, 1909.

The entire scrapbook is scanned and can be seen online here. I will leave you with one of his many poems from the scrapbook titled “If Thou Hast Crushed a Flower”
If thou hast crush’d a flower
the war may not be blighted;
If thou hast quenched a lamp
once more it may be lighted
But on thy harp, or on thy lute
the string which thou hast broken
shall never in sweet sound again
give to thy touch a token!

Panoramas of Campus to Immerse Yourself in the Not-too-distant Past

Panorama of the Duck Pond, from 1995

This week I wanted to share a small collection of panoramic photographs that were taken of various locations around the Virginia Tech campus back in 1995 (and a couple from 2000). The photographs were made by University Relations, and although they were taken recently (well, relative to most of our collections!) they were still captured non-digitally on film and given to us as oversized 2.5″ X 16″ photographic prints. Seeing a flat 360 degree view is one thing, but once we scanned them and installed a panoramic viewer on our Special Collections Online site, they really came to life in a very immersive way. You can see the above picture of the Duck Pond with the viewer here.

Spring Graduation at Lane Stadium, 1995

Most of the photos will look pretty familiar, with one noticeable difference being the smaller stands in Lane Stadium with roughly 15,000 less seats. You can immerse yourself in the 1995 Spring Commencement ceremony here. Another would be the absence of Torgersen Bridge behind the Pylons in this view of the Drill Field. Torgersen Hall and the bridge over Alumni Mall were not completed until 2000.

You can see all the panoramic photos in this collection here.

But I’ll leave you with one more panorama here, a vertigo-inducing shot from the floor of the War Memorial Hall foyer looking straight up at the vaulted ceiling. This one might best be seen without the viewer!

Ceiling of the War Memorial Hall foyer

LGBTQ History at Virginia Tech Part 1: The Struggle for Recognition

Going off to college is when many students discover who they really are for the first time, and for some this can be a very scary thing. This is especially true if the real you is someone that your university and society at large refuses to recognize or accept. This was the reality for members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and Queer communities at Virginia Tech for many years, and it continues to be in many places around the world even today. From an archival and historical perspective, this presents a big challenge. If a group is marginalized and denied acceptance, then they won’t show up in the mainstream. If they’re forced to live in secret, their history won’t be in the written record, at least not accurately. So basically, how do you document the undocumented?

One option is to record the histories that were never written down, but still remembered by those who lived them with oral histories. This was the inspiration for the Virginia Tech LGBTQ Oral History Project, which had its beginnings in 2013 in the Ex Lapide Society, a Virginia Tech LGBTQ alumni group. Since then, Special Collections and members of various organizations and departments around campus have gotten involved, including graduate and undergraduate-level oral history classes, in which students conducted a series of oral history interviews in Fall 2014. Those interviews will be online in the coming months as part of an interactive exhibit, and the project will undoubtedly grow beyond oral histories to include many other collections, materials and exhibits documenting the history of the LGBTQ communities at Virginia Tech.

Constitution for the Gay Alliance of Virginia Tech, the first openly-gay student organization.

As an early part of this project, I started digging around in some of our university archives collections from the late 1960s and early 1970s, looking for some of the earliest documentation we have of the LGBTQ community at Virginia Tech. This documentation involves the Gay Alliance, the first openly gay student group on campus, and their struggles with university administration to be recognized as an official Virginia Tech student organization. In the records of Vice President William McKeefery, I found a file with documentation regarding the decision to accept or reject the Gay Alliance as an official student group. Included was a copy of the group’s constitution, a report on homosexuality from the Department of Health, a memorandum to President T. Marshall Hahn regarding the commission’s decision, and correspondence between Gay Alliance President Robert Frye and Virginia Tech Vice President William McKeefery. In the Office of Academic Affairs Records 1961-1977, I found a letter from the Dean for Student Programs to the Vice President for Student Affairs, discussing the Student Constitutional Affairs Board’s vote to recognize the Gay Alliance as an official student organization on May 12, 1971. Although the board had voted four to one to approve the Gay Alliance, there was a major point of contention over the fact that the organization’s purpose and objectives were in violation of Virginia state law (Virginia’s laws against same-sex sexual relations were not officially repealed until 2014).

A statement written by Executive Assistant to the President and General Council Walter H. Ryland to University President Dr. T. Marshall Hahn, Jr. regarding the Gay Student Alliance.

Ultimately, the decision was appealed and struck down by the Commission on Student Affairs. But the struggle continued. In the papers of Alfred H. Krebs, Vice President for Special Projects, I found a written statement from May 5, 1976, on the rationale for rejecting the approval of the Gay Student Alliance as an official Virginia Tech student group.

The Gay Student Alliance did not gain official status at Virginia Tech until Fall 1976, but then fell inactive for several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s due to lack of leadership. It would not be until 1985, when the next LGBTQ organization, Lambda Horizon, officially formed that the LGBTQ communities would begin to play an active role on campus. That will be in the next part of this story, so stay tuned!

A New Collection and a New Look at Virginia Tech’s Architectural Style

Glass plate negative of a drawing of a proposed dormitory building in the Upper Quad. The design of the current Upper Quad construction is based on these original designs.

The same drawing with the colors inverted to make it a positive image.

An important bit of Virginia Tech history came through our doors recently in a unique form- a collection of 8 x 10 glass plate negatives of architectural drawings and artist renderings that were made by the architectural firm Carneal and Johnston. These designs were made for several campus buildings in the 1910’s, including the original McBryde Hall and the original library building. In addition to the campus buildings that were built, some of the glass plates depict drawings for proposed buildings, including an alumni hall and new dormitories for the Upper Quad- projects that wouldn’t be taken up until nearly 100 years later, and, in the case of the Upper Quad, are actually being built as we speak.

A drawing of a proposed alumni hall designed by Carneal and Johnston in 1916

Floor plan of the proposed alumni hall

 

The glass plate negatives were made using the silver gelatin dry plate process- a direct forerunner of roll film- in which the glass plates were treated with emulsion and allowed to fully dry long in advance of actually exposing them in a camera. This technique, developed in the 1870s, was a huge improvement in convenience over the wet plate process, in which the emulsion on the plate had to be wet when it was exposed, meaning the photographer had to apply the emulsion right before taking the photograph, (and you can imagine how much of a hassle that might be if you were photographing out on location somewhere).

 

These particular dry plates were made as copy photographs of the original architectural drawings made by Carneal and Johnston as well as artist renderings made by Hughton Hawley for the architectural firm and probably served the purpose of what digital scans do today- to make high-quality renderings of the original image in another format that can be preserved as well as easily copied and shared. As relatively large and thin plates of glass, they are extremely fragile, yet amazingly, other than a few chips, most of the 23 glass plates have survived intact over the past 100 years.

A prospective drawing of a proposed dormitory building in the Upper Quad.

What the same negative looks like with the colors inverted to make it a positive image.

William Leigh Carneal, Jr., and James Markam Ambler Johnston (a VPI alumnus) began their firm around 1908 after spending a year working independently out of the same office space. The firm went on to become one of the most prolific and long-established architectural practices in Virginia, surviving after the original architects retired in 1950 up until 1999, when the firm merged with Ballou Justice & Upton, Architects, and ceased to use the name Carneal and Johnston. These designs from the mid 1910’s were made very early in the firm’s career and possibly represent the very first of what would be many design projects for Virginia Tech (then known as VPI)’s campus.

 

President Joseph Dupuy Eggleston Jr., whose term lasted from 1913 to 1919, likely had a hand in commissioning these early designs from the firm. President Eggleston saw architecture as a way for the struggling young college to build its own unique identity, and the Carneal and Johnston’s design of the original McBryde Hall would set the standard for all campus buildings that were built over the following half century- a dramatic collegiate gothic style clad entirely in our signature grey hokie stone. The gothic hokie stone buildings gave the VPI campus a radically different look and feel from the red brick neoclassical style present at most of Virginia’s college campuses, and remains a unique and integral part of our identity even today.

This collection of glass plates negatives is currently being processed and will be available both online and in physical form soon!