The Alumni House is the teal building (204) beside the red box #12 on the map above
When we were in college at William and Mary in the 1960s, the alumni affairs office was in the Brafferton building, across from the President’s house on the College Yard. I think. I didn’t know any alumni and I certainly never wondered about the location of the office that dealt with alumni.
This building, built in 1847 and known as the “Bright House,” served a variety of functions over the years. When we were in college, the building housed faculty apartments. Our English professor Bob Maccubbin lived on the bottom floor (the windows to the right of the door in this picture); we went to a wine and cheese party in his apartment one time while we were in his class.
In 1972, the Alumni Association moved to this location, and the building was renamed the Alumni House. Over the years, the building was expanded to be more functional for Alumni events. In 2020, a major renovation of the building was completed, adding 33,000 square feet to the building and making it one of the largest social gathering spaces on campus.
Here’s a recent pre-expansion view of the Alumni House. For many years, this was the Homecoming weekend gathering place and post-game “tailgate” location..
This is the newly renovated Alumni House. The “old” Alumni House (the Bright House) is incorporated as a wing for the expanded building. It’s on the right of this picture.
This plaza, which faces the football stadium across a road, is paved with memorial bricks purchased by alumni and friends of the college as part of the effort to raise the money for this renovation.
Yes, gentle readers, we bought a brick...
This diagram purports to show where our brick is. This diagram is wrong. It says our brick is in the mustard yellow section, but it’s not. It’s in the area that I’ve circled in blue above. We made several visits to try to find our brick; we walked around the plaza, eyes fixed on the bricks beneath our feet, searching, to no avail. Before you ask, we did look beyond the mustard yellow section, but we didn’t extend our search quite far enough. It then took several calls to the Alumni Association (memorial bricks division, I guess) to see if they could find our brick. They couldn’t, so they ordered a new one for us. Then we got a phone call – in looking for someone else’s brick, they found ours! They’re still going to send us the duplicate brick since it was already ordered and they didn’t think anyone else would want it. Thus endeth the saga of the memorial brick.
We don’t have any memories of this newly renovated building because we haven’t actually been inside it yet. The renovation began before the pandemic and was finished during the pandemic year. I have taken a “virtual” tour of the building, and it has just begun to reopen to events over the past several months. Homecoming events will be in this building on October 5-6 of this year, and Literacy for Life is holding its Reading Between the Wines fundraiser there in October, so I’ll be there for these events.
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How nice. And the location of your brick is in a similar location to your dorm room--in your first year, I think. Kind of nice.