Dining at Davidson College

Dining at Davidson College has not always been as easy as going down to
Vail Commons for Sunday brunch or grabbing a sandwich in the Alvarez
Student Union Café.

Because Davidson College began as a manual labor school, the first dining facility named Steward’s Hall (built in 1836-1837 as the college’s first non-residential building) only provided the location for meals, not food.  Students were required to spend a certain amount of time each day–based on their age and size–working to produce their own food on the college’s farm.

By 1845, Davidson had totally relinquished the need to provide their students with meals. Students could dine in Steward’s Hall, which was now run by private managers, or at a private boarding house approved by the college.  Thus began the tradition of boarding houses that extended until the end of World War II.

Boarding houses were typically in town, and the scarcity of goods caused them to be quite expensive:  while tuition was around $60 in the late nineteenth century, meals usually were above $10 a month.  Fearing that potential students would be turned away by the high cost of dining, President Shearer opened a boarding house that only cost $4 a month.

When the college tore down Steward’s Hall in 1909, every Davidson student had to find a boarding house to provide their meals.  Many boarding houses were associated with certain fraternities, and the construction of fraternity houses on Jackson Court in 1928 only strengthened that association.  The fraternity houses did not have kitchens, so members of a certain fraternity all tried to flock to the same boarding house.  This worked well for about 15 years, until the beginning of World War II.

Before the war, the new Chambers Building had been equipped with a full kitchen, though it was not intended to feed students. However, with the arrival of military cadets on campus, there was also a need for new dining facilities.  These cadets were eventually fed in the Chambers Gallery (now Lily Gallery).  After the war, increased enrollment forced Davidson to maintain the Gallery as a dining room for students who could not find boarding houses.  The Gallery continued to operate as this dining room until Ovens College Union was built in 1952.

With the construction of Ovens Cafeteria and of the new Patterson Court fraternity houses (with kitchen), the college thought the problem of dining would be completely solved.  However, a decline in fraternity participation in the 1960s and early 1970s, as well as overcrowding and the cheap price of food in Ovens Cafeteria, made the college realize that there was a need for more places to eat on campus.  So, in 1972 they converted two unused fraternity houses to dining facilities, and in 1981 built Vail Commons.

Today there are many options for dining at Davidson:  Vail Commons is open for 19 meals a week, the Alvarez Student Union café is open all day, the Wildcat Den in Baker Sports Complex offers lunch on weekdays, and the Union Outpost is open on Patterson Court Wednesday through Saturday nights.  In addition to on-campus dining, a few restaurants and stores on Main Street accept Cat Cards, the primary method of paying for meals at Davidson.  Perhaps instead of worrying about the limited times for meal plans, we should all be grateful Davidson no longer asks us to grow our own food!

This entry was written by Sarah Adams, the student assistant to Davidson College Archives.