Chadwick Court - A History

Chadwick Court – A History

By Beth Swift, Archivist

The gymnasium as built in 1917

This year the Faculy-Alumni-Staff Symposium has basketball as its theme. With this in mind it seems a good time to share a little history of the basketball facilities here at Wabash. This picture was taken just after the new gym was finished in 1917. This was an amazing space and the students were wild for it. Prior to this basketball was played at the YMCA in downtown Crawfordsville. As the photograph below shows, that court was dark and small and home to three other teams. The local high school, the YMCA and the business school here in town all utilized it along with Wabash College. Still, it was better than many courts at other schools.

This advertisement from the Wabash Magazine of 1912 shows two views of the facilities at the YMCA. Note the busyness of the space as there were 732 games played there in one season. Quite a hub of activity!

You might ask why Wabash was playing in a building downtown, this picture of our Polytechnic tells the tale.

One look at this hall, decorated for the inauguration of President Kane, and we can see that all of those posts would be dangerous to a fast paced game of basketball. Built in 1872 before the advent of basketball, the Polytechnic Gymnasium was obviously unsuited to the new sport. When basketball really caught on, the calls for a new gym became louder and more insistent as the following headline of The Bachelor from April of 1912 shows.

In 1916 a plan was adopted and demolition on the old Polytechnic began in earnest.  Here is drawing of the modern new gym by the architect Herbert Foltz of Indianapolis.

 

 

It was a tremendous facility which included locker rooms and a practice gymnasium on the second floor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now the former locker room is a computer lab and the second floor gymnasium was divided into separate rooms.

 

 

By the 1960’s the athletics facilities were once again less than desirable. The old gym needed work and a former basketball champ stepped in to help. Maurice “Shang” Chadwick was the tallest fellow on the 1922 national championship team pictured here.

 

 

It was Shang who donated the money and it is for this support that we now call our gym Chadwick Court.