The Ladies Annex as Building and Program
The First building on the current SU Campus, gone and almost forgotten, was a separate space for women
The Ladies’ Annex building was built in 1879 in the place where Brown-Cody now stands. It was the first University building built on this campus, as it was separated by several blocks from Southwestern’s “Old Campus,” closer to downtown Georgetown. For the first few decades of its existence, it was essentially self-contained as a separate college for women, complete with classrooms, housing, common spaces, and a cafeteria. The Ladies Annex building itself has been gone for 100 years, however, and there are no permanent memory markers commemorating it on campus, so it is becoming increasingly hard to feel its legacy and importance to the Southwestern community.
For the first few years of Southwestern’s existence, it was a men's-only college. Before the official establishment of a women’s education program through the university, the Young Ladies’ School was established in 1878 and held meetings and classes in the basement of the First Presbyterian Church Georgetown. In response to the lack of physical space for educating women in the city, the townspeople, teachers, and preachers as well as significant male leaders at Southwestern such as Francis Asbury Mood, all advocated for their daughters to receive an education on par with the education their sons were getting and pushed for the establishment of the Ladies’ Annex.
The building was completed in 1879. When it was built, the main building for Southwestern was located a half-mile east of our current campus, closer to Georgetown Square, so the Ladies’ Annex Building was the first building built on our current campus. In a Megaphone article from February 11th, 1919, a historical account from Claude Carr Cody described the origins of the Ladies’ Annex and how there were 52 girls and women enrolled in the women's school for the first year.
For the next 24 years, Southwestern remained segregated by gender, so the women of Southwestern all lived and learned within the Annex. The space was used for all the activities only involving young women as they were separated from the men, which included sleeping quarters, dining, parlors, classrooms, reading rooms, a library, a gymnasium, an infirmary, and social halls containing various women's literary societies and the first sorority chapter rooms.
Tragically, the building burned early on the morning of January 8, 1925, due to what is said to be an electrical fire. The Megaphone issue days after, on January 13, 1925, describes how the campus was grieving the loss of the long-beloved Ladies’ Annex. Mood Hall was given up to the women by the men as they were housed by local families around town, and the women remained housed in Mood until the construction of the new Women’s Building, later named Laura Kuykendall Hall, a year later. The 1925 issue of the Sou’Wester yearbook dedicated a page to the Annex and included a message saying that the building no longer proudly housed the ladies of Southwestern and would be missed eternally. The memories within the physical space were lost in the fire. Because the Annex was quickly replaced by the Women’s Building on the same footprint, the Women’s Building itself carried the burden of remembering its predecessor by repeating most of its social and domestic functions (but not its educational ones, as the University had established co-ed classes by then). The women who experienced life within the Annex and knew of the Annex provided the only active means of memorializing the space, which was short-lived as those women graduated.
Today, the Ladies Annex is not present in Southwesterns’ collective memory as there is no physical, public commemoration of the building or institution itself. The building itself represented women's education and held a lot of history regarding their experiences of establishing their communities, societies, events, and ways of living.
Discussion about the Annex was very present in The Megaphone while it stood and well after it burned, whether it was about an event being held, the women who lived there, or stories about the history of Southwestern. The last mentions are in a 1982 issue about the historical buildings of the University. After this issue, the discussion about the Ladies Annex in the media that students view on a daily basis diminished, therefore decreasing the remembrance of the building.
The Ladies Annex building and program should be a present discussion on campus in order to maintain the memory of what once stood in the place of Brown-Cody Hall (and the Women’s Building and LK Hall before it) and how it was the founding building of the University, because it was the first Southwestern building on this campus. Without these discussions, the building will be forgotten and not commemorated in the way it should be.
