During the 2024 spring semester, Baldwin Wallace’s intro to museums and archives class put together the “Kohler: Man, Myth, Hall” exhibit to be displayed in Ritter Library throughout the course of the 2024-2025 school year.
Located on the first floor of Ritter Library, the exhibit outlines the life of Kohler Hall, the oldest building on BW’s campus, from its construction in the 1850s to its closing in 2018. It includes articles from the archives, as well as photographs and a timeline of its major changes.
BW Archivist Kieth Peppers is the person who ran the class and oversaw the creation of this exhibit.
While the exhibit on Kohler is contained mainly to one section of Ritter Library, the library typically would have done a larger exhibit for the fall semester; however, due to “budget constraints,” a larger exhibit was not able to be enacted for the fall 2024 semester, Peppers said.
Because of these limitations on the budget, Peppers had his intro to museums and archives class put together the exhibit.
“It was all student led, student curated, student researched,” Peppers said. “They did all the work.”
Hanging in the center of the exhibit is a banner that reads “Save Kohler Hall.” It originally hung from an on-campus house in 2019, after it was announced that Kohler would be closing.
The exhibit also includes a miniature wooden model of Kohler Hall built by retired U.S Marine Corps veteran, senior transfer student and public history major, Casey Senn. The version of Kohler Hall displayed in the exhibit is different from what it looks like on campus now. Rather, it is modeled after how it looked during the 1890s.
“Since we had contemporary pictures, and people can see how it still is today, I wanted to represent how it was before the 1940 remodel,” Senn said.
Kohler itself is known around BW’s campus for rumors about its past uses and its ghost stories. There are legends that it was a morgue, an infirmary during the Civil War and a mental institution that Peppers all said to be false. Its ghost stories include the “Blue Haze,” a ghost that is said to have ripped blankets from students’ beds.
It closed in 2018 due to the damaging moisture that grew between the original brick structure of the building and the false sandstone exterior that was originally created to make it resemble the surrounding buildings, such as Marting and Dietsch.
Although it was set to be torn down several years ago, deconstruction was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, plans for its demolition are unknown.
“It’s going to be a piece of Baldwin Wallace history we’re never going to get back after it’s demolished and taken away,” Senn said.
Despite the uncertainty about Kohler Hall’s future, the exhibit in the library highlights its place in Baldwin Wallace’s history. The exhibit’s name, “Kohler: Man, Myth, Hall,” also provides representation for the man it was named after, its ghostly legends and its actual history as a Baldwin Wallace dormitory.
