Photos: Photograph of Cameron Avenue between 1885 and 1900, with Old Memorial Hall at right (left) and UNC archaeologist Vin Steponaitis standing over the portico foundation of Old Memorial Hall in 1992 (right).
The present Memorial Hall on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus was built in 1931 and replaced an earlier structure built in 1885. This earlier building, now known as Old Memorial Hall, was a wood and brick, six-sided, Victorian-Gothic structure designed by well-known architect Samuel Sloan. Originally intended to be a memorial to UNC President David Swain, its function as a memorial was soon expanded to include others connected with the university, such as William R. Davie, Joseph Caldwell, and those former students who fought and died during the Civil War. By the early twentieth century, Old Memorial Hall had gone out of style architecturally and was increasingly regarded as structurally unsound; in 1930 it was torn down.
When new Memorial Hall was erected in 1931, it was placed on the same site where Old Memorial Hall had stood; however, it did not completely cover the earlier building’s foundations. The new building’s front portico (on Cameron Avenue) was positioned about 8 ft. south of where the earlier portico had stood, and because of its coffin-like plan, the foundations for the east and west sides of Old Memorial Hall extended 10-20 ft. beyond the later Memorial Hall’s footprint.
Foundations associated with the earlier building were documented by university archaeologists on two occasions. In 1992, excavation of a wide trench to replace aging utility lines along the south side of Cameron Avenue exposed the deeply buried brick foundation of the front portico; these were photographed but not mapped. A decade later, plans were approved to renovate and expand the building, and between 2002 and 2005 archaeologists were afforded opportunities as construction was underway to expose, map, and photograph portions of the wall foundations along the northeast, northwest, and west sides. These brief investigations confirmed the placement of Old Memorial Hall relative to the current building. Today, the buried foundations of the front portico are all that remain of Old Memorial Hall.