This simple structure, fondly dubbed the Old Frame, was first erected in 1836, on a 200-acre parcel of farmland less than a mile southwest of the Village of Granville, on the original campus of the Granville Literary and Theological Institution. The school had been in a condition of chronic debt since its founding in 1831, its precarious finances compounded by an unsteady national economy, the loss of a previous building which burned to the ground, and by trustees who were “of limited knowledge and more limited in finance in College matters,” according to its first president, John Pratt, who was not of a fundraising temperament himself.
The three-storied, 24-room building was to serve as both dormitory and classrooms for the institution’s young men, and the money borrowed and raised to build it was found only with considerable difficulty. Within a decade of the Old Frame’s construction, the school’s name had been changed to Granville College, and by 1850 the building’s condition was described as “very shattered” from inadequate upkeep and “long and hard usage.”
The treasury was empty, efforts to sell much of its farmland to raise money for a new roof and emergency repairs had failed, and faculty positions were pared down to the president, two professors, and a tutor. The number of “pious students” applying for admission was also declining, and Granville College went through a period of great uncertainty and argument over the wisdom of moving its location to a more economically promising town.
Granville was ultimately secured as the college’s new location after much wrangling, the appointment of a new president, and an ambitious campaign to raise an endowment for the college by subscription, which included the donation of $10,000 by a Muskingum County farmer named William S. Denison.
The trustees couldn’t improve Granville’s accessibility to transportation or commerce, but when land on the hill immediately above the village became available, they saw an opportunity to eliminate the inconvenience of the college’s distance from town. In 1854, the “farm” location was abandoned, and a Mr. S. Burnett was paid $2,645 to partially dismantle and carry the Old Frame over that “unmeasured mile of unmeasured mud,” across Raccoon Creek, and up the steep hill to the south-facing site of what is now Ebaugh Laboratories. This photograph shows the Old Frame in its later years, when it was used as a makeshift gymnasium before being razed in 1905.