Phi and Eu Halls

Phi and Eu

The whole area that was used by the original college beginning in 1835 (including old dormitory row, Phi and Eu halls, Chambers, and the site of current Cunningham) was cleared and maintained by enslaved people (DC Archives 2015). The college’s early sub-committee on building ordered 250,000 bricks from the plantation of John Caldwell, which indicates that these bricks would have been made by enslaved people (Shaw 1923, 15). Shaw (Ibid.) boasts that everyone in the community helped to assemble the early buildings, but her description of “wagons and teams for hauling brick” strongly suggests that enslaved people aided in construction and assembly. Phi and Eu were some of these earliest buildings, completed in 1849 and 1850 respectively as literary halls and student libraries (Yi and Mellin 2018).