Dewey Hall

Dewey Hall opened in October 1930 on the south side of Eastman Quadrangle.  It was funded by Charles Ayrault Dewey, M.D., an 1861 graduate, as a memorial to his father Chester Dewey, who was Professor of Natural Science from 1850 to his death in 1867.  He was a prominent botanist, antislavery activist, clergyman and educator.  He died on the December 15, 1867.  He was also a Congregational Minister and the first man to collect weather statistics for the city of Rochester.

The building housed geology and biology, with a museum wing attached at the rear making it the largest academic building.  A vivarium, partly a greenhouse, to the south enhanced the resources for teaching botany.

During World War II a set of graduate students who occupied the top floor of Dewey Hall where bunks were sandwiched in between museum skeletons.

An annex was added to the south side of the building in 1969, which was renamed for Carol G. Simon in 1990 when the Simon School moved into the space.  The new name has not fully caught on with the occupants. 

References
1867 Dr Chester Dewey (1784-1867) Grave in Mt. Hope Cemetery

1869 Proceedings of the Fifth Anniversary of the University Convocation of the State of New York, held August 4th, 5th, and 6th, 1869.
Pages 121-132:  Sketch of the Life of Prof. Chester Dewey, D.D., LL.D., by Martin B. Anderson

1884 Semi-Centennial History of the City of Rochester, by William F. Peck
Pages 650- 653: Chester Dewey, D.D., L.L.D., at the time of his death emeritus professor in the University of Rochester, was in two respects a representative man. He was not only a typical teacher, but he also held a distinguished position among the few who at an early day cultivated and organised the study. of natural science in America.
Dr. Dewey was born in Sheffield, Berkshire county, Massachusetts, October 25th, 1784. His father was a man of strong character and clear head, who seems to have had the will and the capacity to give his son a most symmetrical training, both moral and intellectual. In this work the father was aided by a wife of singular piety, cheerfulness and moral excellence. It was doubtless to these early formative influences that Dr. Dewey owed much of that moral completeness which adorned the whole of his subsequent life. After a youth spent in alternate labor on the farm and study in the common school, he fitted himself to enter the college at Williamstown, Massachusetts, in his eighteenth year. He graduated in i8o6, taking rank as a scholar among the first in his class. During his residence in college he became the subject of those deep religious convictions, by which he ever after ordered his entire life. After graduation he lived and studied with Dr. Stephen West, who was an eminent theologian of the time, and for sixty years pastor of the church in Stockbridge, Mass. In 1807 he was licensed to preach by the Berkshire association (Congregational). After teaching and preaching for a few months at West Stockbridge and Tyringham, Mass., he was appointed a tutor in Williams college. Although he thus entered on a new field of labor, he never really retired from the pulpit. For fifty years he accepted frequent invitations to preach, in scores of churches in many places. and did nearly as much work of this kind as if preaching were his only occupation, and he had no other regular and pressing duties to perform.
After two years service as tutor he was elected (at the age of twenty-six) professor of mathematics and natural philosophy. He held this position till 1827, a period of seventeen years. During this time the college was poor and struggling for life. Of necessity, a heavy burden of labor and responsibility rested upon the officers of instruction. Among these Dr. Dewey bore a distinguished part. In times of confusion and internal disorder, his influence over the students is said to have been most salutary and powerful. According to the custom of the time, his department of instruction included not only mathematics and physics, but the whole range of chemistry and the natural sciences.
He entered upon the work of accumulating and organising the apparatus and collections requisite for the study of chemistry and natural history with great zeal and enthusiasm; while he was equally earnest in giving instruction in the severer portions of the broad department for whose cultivation in the college he was responsible. He fitted up a laboratory and commenced making collections for the illustration of botany, mineralogy and geology. This was accomplished mainly by personal labor and exchanges with those engaged in similar pursuits in our own and other countries. These labors gave the initial impulse to the cultivation of the natural sciences in Williams college and laid the foundations of its now large and valuable illustrative collections.
In 1827 Dr. Dewey resigned the chair which he had so long held. The friends of education in Western Massachusetts had been impressed with the necessity of providing more systematic and vigorous instruction for young men preparing for college and immediate business pursuits. An opportunity for public service of this sort of more immediate usefulness, as it seemed to him, than was afforded by his college chair, was found in the establishment of a Gymnasium at Pittsfield. He removed to Pittsfield, where from 1822 he had been engaged as professor of botany and chemistry in the Medical college, and became principal of this institution. He remained in Pittsfield nine years, at the same time occupying the chair of botany and chemistry in the Medical college there. His connection with this medical school was retained after his removal to Rochester, until about 1850. From 1841 he lectured for about nine years also at the Medical school in Woodstock, Vermont. In 1836 he removed to this city, and took charge of the collegiate institute, This institution in connection with Professor N. W. Benedict and others, he conducted with high success for fourteen years. In 1850, at the establishment of the University of Rochester, he was elected professor of chemistry and natural history in that institution, and continued to discharge the duties of that chair for a little more than ten years. He retired from active duty in 1861, at the ripe age of seventy-six.
Dr. Dewey was always ready to aid those who were honestly working to acquire an education. Many of his pupils who became eminent in the scientific world were glad to attribute their success largely to the inspiration of his enthusiasm, fullness of knowledge and willingness to teach. In his chosen profession of teacher he was an enthusiast. His whole life was absorbed in obtaining knowledge and imparting it to others. In the street, in the social circle, in the professor's chair, he was always the teacher. No person could come within the sphere of his influence without carrying away some new fact or thought, or being inoculated with new love for moral or natural truth. In his mind new truths seemed to fall spontaneously into the form adapted for presentation to the learner. He always conceived of nature and man as belonging to a common system, related to each other in every part and designed to illustrate a common moral purpose. This naturally led him to estimate new investigations and discoveries to be important mainly as they served to set forth the moral dignity of man, to promote his happiness and elevate his character. His intellectual life was a beautiful commentary on the remark of Gibbon, that "It is a greater glory to science to develop and perfect mankind, than it is to enlarge the boundaries of the known universe." He was utterly free from those petty jealousies which so often manifest themselves among scientific men. He rejoiced in scientific progress, to whomsoever it was due, and was always most generous in his estimate of the achievements of others. To his mind there was no broad separation between the moral and the material order. But he was intensely averse to that false philosophy .which seeks unity at the expense of reducing all thought and volition to dynamics, making no distinction between man and a crystal. To his mind, the whole scheme of material things was ever throbbing and quivering with Divine life, benevolence and power. This profound recognition of God in the modes in which he has revealed himself, rounded and completed his moral and intellectual life and made him, by way of eminence, the good teacher.
As a man of science, Dr. Dewey belongs to a class whose abilities and public services are liable, in our time, to be overlooked or underrated. Reference is here made to those men who were pioneers in the work of cultivating and popularising natural science in our country. When Amos Eaton, Parker Cleveland, Robert Hare, Benjamin Silliman, Edward Hitchcock and Chester Dewey began their labors, the natural sciences, as they are now understood, had, in this country, hardly an existence. Since that time the discoveries and investigations upon which they rest have in great part been made or matured.
Dr. Dewey left college in 1806. Just about this period that remarkable impulse was given to scientific inquiry, resulting in almost simultaneous development of chemistry, zoology, crystallography, botany and geology, which rendered the first half of the nineteenth century so supremely illustrious.
In connection with his labors in giving instruction in colleges, medical schools and academies, Dr. Dewey was not unmindful of his obligations to make some additions to the sum of scientific knowledge. He was for forty years a constant contributor to Silliman's Journal. He always studied with pen in hand and was a constant writer on scientific subjects for the newspaper press. He became early in life an enthusiastic student of botany and contributed very largely to the scientific knowledge of the carices. Dr. Asa Gray, our great botanist, classes Dr. Dewey with Schweinitz and Torrey, and speaks of his writings on caricography as "an elaborate monograph patiently prosecuted through more than forty years." He further, says: "In connection with the two botanists above mentioned, he laid the foundation and insured the popularity of the study of the sedges in this country." Unfortunately, Dr. Dewey did not write any systematic treatise on this subject, but his numerous short articles represent the progress of his own observations and studies and give a history of the progress of that department of botanical science. Dr. Dewey wrote a History of the Herbaceous Plants of Massachusetts, which was published by the state. He contributed, also, the article on carices, to Wood's Botany. Up to the last year of his life, his mind showed the vigor and enthusiasm of his early years. and he was constantly writing on scientific topics, mainly for reviews. His last publications of any length were two review articles, one entitled The True Place of Man in Zoology, the other, An Examination of Some of the Reasonings against the Unity of Mankind. These articles were read first before a literary association in Rochester, of which the doctor was one of the founders. They displayed a full and intelligent familiarity with all the most recent discoveries and speculations bearing upon these difficult and complicated questions. His last labors were the orderly arrangement of his large collection of sedges, which had been for so many years accumulating on his hands, and copying out his meteorological journal. Just before his death, while engaged upon his journal, his hand became unable to hold a pen, and, calling for the aid of his daughter, he placidly remarked that this would be his last report to the Smithsonian Institution. He died calmly, of old age, on the 15th of December, 1867, in his 84th year. He had the control of his faculties to the last, sustained by an unfaltering trust in a blessed life hereafter.
Dr. Dewey married Sarah Dewey of Stockbridge, Mass., in 1810. She died in 1823. Of their five children all are now dead. In 1825 he married Olivia Hart, eldest child of Lemuel Pomeroy, of Pittsfield, Mass. Mrs. Dewey still lives, with her daughter, Mrs. William H. Perkins, in this city. The other surviving children are Chester P. Dewey, of Brooklyn, and Mrs. Henry Fowler, and Dr. Charles A. Dewey, of Rochester.

1927 Rochester, the making of a university, by Jesse Leonard Rosenberger, with an introduction by President Rush Rhees....

1931 "The Biology Wing of the Biology-Geology Building, University of Rochester," by William Dayton Merrell, Department of Biology, The American School and University 4:429-433 (1931-1932)

1943 Dr Herman LeRoy Fairchild (1850-1943) Grave in Evergreen Cemetery, Brooklyn, Pennsylvania

1943 "Dr. Fairchild passes at 93: science dean," Democrat and Chronicle, November 30, 1943, Page 13 | Part 2 |
Famed geologist had won honors over world

1945 Proceedings Volume of the Geological Society of America for 1944, May 1945
Pages 185-222: Memorial to Herman Leroy Fairchild, by George Halcott Chadwick

1969 "Dewey Annex to House Departments," Campus Times, March 4, 1969, Page 5.
The department of philosophy and the department of languages and linguistics will occupy the third and fourth floors of the new wing of Dewey hall, Provost Robert L. Sproull announced yesterday. In addition, the lowest floor of the new unit will become the primary River campus center for language laboratories.
Philosophy will gain more than 600 square feet of space and languages and linguistics, about 1000 square feet, when they move to their new quarters. This includes some space to be used in common by both departments.
The $1.5 million wing is to be completed early this summer and will probably be occupied during July and August.
The third and fourth floor areas, to be shared by the two College of Arts and Science departments, will include faculty offices, an office for teaching assistants, a joint reading room, commons rooms, a seminar-conference room for the philosophy department (adjacent to its commons rooms), and workrooms.
As announced last summer, the first and second floor areas will house some programs of the College of Business Administration, including the controversial systems analysis program, and general-purpose meeting rooms. The latter will be used primarily for departments housed in Dewey hall, but may also be assigned to other departments for undergraduate and graduate courses as needed. The lowest floor of the new wing will house units of the department of languages and linguistics: teaching and research laboratories, a master console room, an acoustics research laboratory, an office and recording booth area, a small testing room, and storage and workshop areas.
The department of philosophy currently is housed in the basement of Lovejoy hall undergraduate residence; languages and linguistics will remain temporarily in Fauver; the language laboratory in Sage, designed as a permanent installation for Towers residents and other students, will remain there.

1977 History of the University of Rochester, 1850-1962, by Arthur J. May.  Expanded edition with notes
Chapter 22, Oak Hill Becomes River Campus
On the south side were erected the Bausch and Lomb Memorial for physics and optics, and Chester Dewey Hall for geology and biology, to which a museum wing was attached at the rear, making it the largest academic building; in it were placed the U. of R. scientific collections, dating back to the Ward purchase of 1862, brought over from the Prince Street Campus. A vivarium, partly a greenhouse, to the south enhanced the resources for teaching botany.
Chapter 30, Education for Victory
Civilians who were not residents of Rochester had to find living facilities in private homes, except, that is for a set of graduate students who occupied the top floor of Dewey Hall where bunks were sandwiched in between museum skeletons
Chapter 35, Reunion of the Colleges
In anticipation of the consolidation of the colleges, Todd Union underwent some remodelling and alterations were effected in Dewey Hall; for want of space and since they were no longer essential in teaching, the historic museum collections were largely sold or given away, and instruction in "natural history" ceased. Specimens that were retained were stored in "Himmel"--the top floor of the former museum wing of Dewey.

1978 "Dewey key figure in Rochester," Campus Time, February 6, 1978, Page 4. | Part 2 |

1985 "Chester's at Dewy, searching for ressurection," Campus Times, February 14, 1985, page 8.
Chester's opened in June, 1983.  Opened from 8 am to 7 pm on weekdays and is located in Room 317A.

1990 "Construction Projects reshape UR," Campus Times, September 23, 1990, Page 1. | Part 2 |
Schlegel Hall and Carol G. Simon Hall.

1990 "Digging In," Rochester Review 53(1):34 (Fall 1990)
Renovation of Dewey Hall and what is now called Dewey Annex, to be renamed Carol G. Simon Hall.

© 2021 Morris A. Pierce