CHAPTER 6Wabash College campus

 

Wabash College was one of the few campuses in Indiana that I was able to visit on more than one occasion. The first was for a crucial, late-season football game between the Little Giants and Wittenberg University the first weekend of November 2011, and the second was for the annual Monon Bell Classic game against DePauw University in 2012. 

Wabash was founded in 1832 by several Dartmouth College graduates and Midwestern leaders, according to the school's entry at Wikipedia. 

Today, the school has an enrollment of about 900 students, boasts 40 degree majors, "the most accessible professors on any campus" (according to its website, it has the second-best alumni network in the land and, also according to the school website, it has a highly regarded and active student government.

Perhaps most impressive is that according to the Wikipedia entry, as of 2024, Wabash had an endowment of $420 million, a number that ranks it third among small private colleges and universities in Indiana, according to College Raptor. 

Wabash credits the hefty size of its endowment to regular fund-raising campaigns, promotion of alumni estate planning giving and private donations by such prominent corporate individuals as Eli Lilly, as well as by Eli Lilly and Co., the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical firm he founded, and Lilly Foundation, the company's philanthropic arm.

The degree programs are sprinkled among three divisions -- humanities and arts, natural sciences and social sciences.  

The college offers an undergraduate liberal arts curriculum in three divisions with 36 majors and minors, a dual-degree program in engineering, two pre-professional programs in law and medicine, and a pipeline program for accounting. 

As of 2020, Wabash was one of only three private, non-religious, all-male colleges in the United States (Hampden-Sydney and Morehouse colleges being the two others, although there also is one religious-affiliated all-male institution, Saint John's University, in Collegeville, Minn.).

My collection of Wabash College campus images were gathered from those two visits to the school. 

Leading off the post is a low-angle perspective of the college's iconic Pioneer Chapel, exploiting dramatic, very late-afternoon sunlight. This was taken after the game. 

The chapel is such a key component of the campus that I'll return to it in the pictures below. The tailgating images at the very bottom of this chapter were taken before the November 2011 game against Wittenberg University. 

All of my Wabash College campus images can be found by following the link in this sentence.

Above and below: Photos I took as I approached campus on game day Saturday, about an hour before kickoff. This is at the northeast corner of campus, at Grant and Wabash avenues. The image below is a tighter composition of the welcoming sign and garden.

Above: The view toward campus from just past the welcoming sign above.  

Above and below: Instead of following the sidewalk above toward the stadium on the south end of campus, I kept walking west along Wabash Avenue, coming across these pregame cookout scenes on the north side of the street. 

Above: Still on Wabash Avenue, this is Trippett Hall, the official welcoming center that also houses admissions and financial aid. This building opened in August 2002.

Above and below: Differing views of Detchon Center for International Studies, located at the northeast corner of the campus mall. 

 Above and below: Two views of the Lilly Library, on the west side of the campus mall. 

Above and below: A perspective and closeup shot of the campus bookstore. You descend a staircase to get to the main entrance to the building from this view along the main, brick-covered pedestrian path.

Above: The entrance to the campus bookstore.

Above: The mall immediately north of Byron P. Hollett Stadium, where the Little Giants' football teams play their home games. The stadium sits along railroad tracks at the south end of campus. 

Above: Pioneer Chapel famously situated behind the visiting school stands -- but in full view of the home crowd.

Above: The railroad tracks serving as a sort of tailgating gravitational force, aided largely by the roomy area to park vehicles. This view looks down from the top of the home team bleachers.

Above: Morris Hall (housing for students in upper classes) on the left, and the back side of Frank Hugh Sparks campus center on the right.

Above: A long-range view of the back side of Frank Hugh Sparks campus center, the student union.

Above: A look at the brick-paved walkway through campus, not far from the bookstore.

Above: At the south end of the college mall, with a little bit of the front of Pioneer Chapel on the left and a lone group of tailgaters straight ahead in the distance.

Above: Back side of the Frank Hugh Sparks campus center, which houses student recreational, cafeteria and lounge facilities.

Above: Front side of the Frank Hugh Sparks campus center. This side faces the campus mall.

Above: A front view of Pioneer Chapel.

Above and below: Captures from the arboretum on the northeast fringe of campus.

Above: Backside of the Detchon Center, formerly Yandes Library Hall. 

Above: Looking north onto Wabash Avenue at the north end of campus.

Above and below: More captures from the arboretum on the northeast fringe of campus.

Above and below: Postgame activity back at the campus mall.

Above: Yet another front view of Pioneer Chapel.

Above: Heading home, lugging portable game-day seating through the arboretum.

Above: The Fine Arts Center, east of Grant Street, with dramatic late-afternoon lighting casting extensive shadows. 

Above: The oft-mentioned railroad tracks on the south end of campus. These people were heading toward the busy area of the tailgating parties.

Next up: Chapter 7, DePauw University vs. Wabash College, Nov. 2011

Previously in Game Day Revisited:

Introduction

Chapter 1: Franklin College vs. Trine University, Sept. 2009

Chapter 2: Franklin College campus

Chapter 3: Hanover College vs. Manchester University, Oct. 2011

Chapter 4: Hanover College campus

Chapter 5: Wabash College vs. Wittenberg University, Nov. 2011

JC Raulston Arboretum, Raleigh, N.C.

Ever since summer 2014, when I made my first visit to North Carolina, that state's beautiful landscape, expansive Atlantic Ocean beaches and friendly climate drew me back ... eventually to the point of moving there in 2017. 

Before the move, though, I spent about 10 days in Cary, a community within the Technology Triangle (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill). The early portion of the trip was designed to babysit for Lee Ann's 17-month-old granddaughter while the girl's parents could get away for a four-day vacation to Riviera Maya, Mexico, which is a little ways south of Cancun on the Yucatan Peninsula.

The early portion of the trip was designed to babysit for Lee Ann's 17-month-old granddaughter while the girl's parents could get away for a four-day vacation to Riviera Maya, Mexico, which is a little ways south of Cancun on the Yucatan Peninsula.

In previous visits to North Carolina, among other places, I made stops in Winston-Salem (July 2014) to photograph the campus of Wake Forest University and Chapel Hill (July 2015), home of the University of North Carolina. Those pursuits evolved as an extension of something I've enjoyed doing in Indiana since 2009, a project I've dubbed Game Day, in which I spend a Saturday at a small Hoosier college or university campus that fields football teams and photograph not only the football game there that day, but also the campus landscapes.

We had such a long stay in Cary this time that I decided to try and squeeze in side trips to both North Carolina State University in Raleigh and Duke University in Durham, and I succeeded on both counts. While in Raleigh, I also swung by the JC Raulston Arboretum, and my pictures of that collection of plants and flowers, in this post, start off my chronicling of the April trip to the Carolinas. The arboretum was recommended to me by a high school classmate, Kris Jarantoski, who is director of the Chicago Botanic Gardens, which boasts one of the largest botanic garden memberships (50,000+) in the country.

The 10-acre Raulston Arboretum is named for its late founder, a NCSU faculty member who began the arboretum in 1976 in tandem with a graduate student, Fielding Scarborough, who was seeking to design an arboretum for his master thesis. The arboretum promotes itself as a nationally acclaimed garden having one of the largest and most diverse collection of plants in the Southeast United States. Even though the arboretum is 3 miles or so west of campus, it is affiliated with NCSU's Department of Horticulture Science, which explains why its website URL ( https://jcra.ncsu.edu/ ) carries an NCSU domain.

Future posts from my trip will look at the two campuses I mentioned above, some of the culinary indulgences enjoyed on the trip, downtown Charleston, and separate Charleston-related excursions to Fort Sumter and Boone Hall Plantation. To view a full gallery of images from my visit to JC Raulston Arboretum, follow the link in this sentence.

Photo geek stuff: I bracketed exposures for all of my photos at the arboretum so I could process them in Photomatix high-dynamic range (HDR) software afterward. I used a Canon 6D equipped with a Tamron 24-300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di VC PZD lens. Most of the three shots for each image were taken at ISO 160, boosting upward accordingly to adapt to darkening available light. I used an aperture of f/8 or f/9. The shutter became the variable camera setting to render my different exposures.