Blow Hall has loomed over Richmond Road for almost 100 years, yet to many students the building’s history remains as mysterious as its labyrinthine interior. A building which was referred to as “the College of William and Mary’s junk drawer” in a previous Flat Hat article was once a symbol of hope and renewal for the College, and also starred in a popular ‘80s music video.
“I think the most interesting thing for Blow Hall is not what it’s become,” said Dr. Rick Mikulski, a history focused research librarian. “I think what’s interesting is what it represents for the College when they built it.”
After the College’s instrumental status in the colonies and early Americas, the rise of other universities and destruction during the Civil War brought a period of uncertainty. Afterwards, the sleepy and somewhat disconnected nature of Williamsburg before its restoration hampered donor interest.
“I think before the 1920s, the idea of investing heavily in the College was a bit of a gamble, because it was kind of in the middle of nowhere,” Mikulski said. “Williamsburg was not even a literal backwater. A backwater is where a train stops for water. It was not even a backwater, the train just went right through.”
In 1923, Adele Matthiessen Blow donated $130,200, equivalent to almost 2.5 million dollars today, for the construction of a new men’s gymnasium at the College, according to Swem Special Collections. The generous donation was proclaimed by The Flat Hat as “the largest individual donation ever made to the College” at the time. It marked a major inflection point on the College’s path to expansion and notoriety, especially because John D. Rockefeller Jr. had yet to publicly announce his investment in the restoration of Williamsburg, which occurred in 1928.
Mrs. Blow made the donation on behalf of her husband, George Preston Blow, who had passed away in 1922. Lieutenant Blow had enjoyed an eventful career in the U.S. Navy during the Spanish-American War, and was later knighted by Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii, according to Swem Special Collections. Blow reportedly had a fondness for the College, since both his father and grandfather were alumni.
Blow Gymnasium was a welcome addition to the College, according to Mikulski, as sports and recreational activities were just as important then as they are today, and their popularity heavily taxed the College’s old gymnasium.
“Almost every student was in some sort of activity, because there’s not much else to do in Williamsburg in 1924,” Mikulski said. “So club sports are actually super, super popular.”
When Blow Gym opened, it was hailed as the best gymnasium in the South, according to Mikulski. The building was declared “modern in all respects” by The Flat Hat at the time. The new gymnasium most notably included basketball courts and a pool in the basement.
However, by the 1940s, Blow Gym was becoming outdated and small, despite a substantial addition which added the rear wing present today.
Blow Gym remained the home of William and Mary basketball until late 1970 when Kaplan Arena opened. In 1988, the tired gymnasium, along with other locations in the area, were featured in the music video for “The Valley Road,” a song co-written and performed by Bruce Hornsby, a homegrown celebrity and Grammy winning artist. That year, “The Valley Road” would top the Billboard charts, and the interior of Blow Gymnasium would be seen around the world.
Cory Springer ‘90 MA ‘11, who grew up in Williamsburg and now serves as an Associate Registrar at the College, told The Flat Hat in an email that she knew and recognized a few of the people in the video, including Eric Stone, a former fire chief of Williamsburg, and John Coleman, who worked on the campus police force. Springer also personally knows Hornsby, as their children went to school together.
Springer recalled the times she spent as a student playing volleyball, working out, using the sauna, swimming in the small pool and running on the rickety track at Blow.
“Rickety, in that the track was a wooden track that was maybe 10 feet wide, and you could certainly feel vibrations when there were multiple people running at the same time,” Springer said in an email to The Flat Hat.
Registrar’s Office manager Shannon Turnage also remembered frequenting the Blow Gymnasium track while growing up in Williamsburg.
“My dad used to play racquetball in here when it was a gym, so we used to walk around the track and entertain ourselves while he was playing,” Turnage said.
When the current Recreation Center opened in 1989, the Blow Gymnasium’s long tenure concluded, and the College began a sweeping renovation of the building. The newly renovated Blow Hall was to house offices, classrooms and meeting spaces, leaving few vestiges of its past as a gymnasium.
A notable exception is the pool, which still remains in the basement of the building. Now inaccessible to the public, the pool is empty and the area is used for storage.
The area which once was an open gymnasium was cut in half by the renovation, and it is now two floors of office space. Both Turnage and Springer have worked in Blow Hall for many years in its renovated form, and their offices are located where many students once played basketball.
This year, things are set to change yet again, according to Turnage. The third floor of Blow is receiving major renovations to house the Provost’s Office, which will likely move in next semester. Blow’s roof is also being replaced. While the third floor renovation project started on time, the roof project did not. The scaffolding, which was supposed to be up around the start of the summer, was only put in place a few weeks ago.
“The roof is anticipated to take about five months or so, because they’re also going to be doing repairs and upgrades to the cupola on top of the building,” Turnage said. “So it will be under construction for quite some time, which makes this one big construction zone.”
The construction on both Blow Hall and neighboring Old Dominion Hall has inconvenienced those who work in the building, according to Turnage. Employees no longer have access to the parking lot beside the building, and they must either park in the few spots in Dawson Circle or further down Richmond Road.
At the end of last semester, it was discovered that Blow Hall was harboring thousands of bees within an exterior wall, and a professional was brought in to help remove the hive. The bees had filled an entire cavity in the wall, attaching their honeycombs to a pipe which traversed through the area.
“There were so many of them because when the beekeeper came down off the scaffolding, he had honey, he had a cone, and it was dripping. I mean, it was amazing. It was just dripping off of his gloves,” said Turnage. “He did let us taste it. And it was raw. I mean, fresh out of the comb.”
It is impossible to grasp now what Blow Gymnasium was really like in those early days, as all the students who attended the College in 1925 are dead. The building however, lives on into its second century.
“I think we focus rightly on the colonial aspects of the College,” Mikulski said. “But I think that buildings like [Blow] that have been here for a century and sort of tell these other stories of the College, it’s worth stopping and paying attention to them.”
Both Turnage and Springer look back on their time in the building fondly.
“As someone who’s been around for a while, I find myself often drawn to nostalgia,” said Springer. “I can’t say that I miss it the way it was, but I do enjoy reminiscing about those times.”