Here’s what https://tribetrek.wm.edu/items/show/30 has to say about Small Hall:
Small Hall is located on Ukrop Way between the Earl Gregg Swem Library and Jones Hall. William & Mary broke ground for the 778,000-square-foot building in August 1962. The building is named for William Small, a professor of Natural Philosophy and mentor to Thomas Jefferson while a student. The building was completed in December 1963 and has been in use since February 1964. Small Hall is currently the home of the Department of Physics and the Physics Library.
A twelve-foot observatory dome housing a ten-inch reflecting telescope was built on the roof in 1975. The observatory was named the Thomas Harriot Observatory after the first astronomer in Virginia who accompanied Raleigh’s expedition from 1585 to 1586. A 6,800 square-foot, two-story addition was added to Small Hall between March and November 1985, containing ten faculty offices and a two-story library.
A project to install a large, high field NMR magnet was completed in 2005 and is one of the largest in the state. From 2008-2011, a large renovation project took place that installed solar panels on the roof, created more lab space, and added a Faraday cage to shield against external electromagnetic radiation.
Here’s what Small’s most famous student, Thomas Jefferson, said about him:
“a man profound in most of the useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communication, correct and gentlemanly manners, and a large and liberal mind... from his conversation I got my first views of the expansion of science and of the system of things in which we are placed.”
I don’t have a lot of memories of this building – When I was a student here I only took one class that met in this location. Tim has many more memories than I do, because he was a physics major for 2 ½ years in college.
This class met on Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday at 8:00 am. Yes, I had a Saturday morning 8 am class. The class format was a lecture for two days of the week and lab on the other day. Saturday was always a lecture day. Fun times.
I don’t remember very much about the substance of this class. The professor was Dr. George Crawford, and I remember him as being fairly easy-going in class and not a very tough grader – although that may have been due to the nature of the class. I recall that he was attentive to the women students in his class – mostly in a courtly (not creepy) way.
I learned a lot about him when I found his obituary on the college website as I was writing this essay.
He lived to be 103 years old, dying in Statesville, North Carolina in 2009. This means he was born in 1906 and was already in his 60s when I took his class. I never knew that.
He had finished his schooling before World War II, when he served as Lieutenant Colonel of Infantry in the European Theater as a member of the First United States Army Headquarters. He took part in Normandy, Central European and Rhineland Campaigns and was awarded six ribbons and three campaign stars.
He taught at North Carolina State University and at Davidson College before joining the faculty at William Mary in 1960. He retired from the college in 1973.
He married in 1934. He and his wife Frances had no children, but his obituary states that they “chose to educate children” – Frances as a first grade teacher and George as a physics professor. The obituary goes on to say the following:
He was talented in wood working including marquetry and furniture making. Until he was nearly 100, he shared his knowledge of astronomy through articles and star charts published in the “Statesville Record & Landmark.”
This is a direct quote from the obituary notice on the college website:
In addition to his excellent record as a teacher and scholar, Professor Crawford performed a service to William and Mary that has significant meaning to all generations of the William and Mary family. In 1971, Professor Crawford, an authority on sundials, began the restoration of the historic William and Mary sundial which had been originally placed on campus in 1815. In 1975, when Professor Crawford had succeeded in making a bronze replica of the sundial to be placed in the New Campus Mall, the fully-restored original sundial was placed in Swem Library.
I never thought about anyone being “an authority on sundials” but this is apparently a thing.
I feel like I have always known about this sundial, although I haven’t thought very much about it. Here’s what one website says about it:
The William & Mary sundial was probably made in London during the seventeenth or early eighteenth century and was most likely at William & Mary when it was chartered or soon thereafter. Subsidiary dial rings simultaneously give the local time for six world locations indicating the sundial was made with a cultural or “world-view” intent.
The earliest reference to the sundial indicates it was located on a wooden pedestal in front of the President’s House in 1815. It was removed during the Civil War by Union Chaplain William H. Gilder for protection and returned in 1889. In 1912, it was moved behind the Wren Building between Science Hall and the library and placed on a sandstone pedestal, a gift of the staff of the Flat Hat, to commemorate the first year of its publication.
The local newspaper, the Daily Press, published an interview with Dr. Crawford in 1994 in which he talked about the sundial. (The interviewer was Parke Rouse, well known for his dozens of books and hundreds of newspaper columns on Virginia history). Here’s part of this essay, titled “Sun Won’t Set on W&M Puzzle:”
One of the unsettled mysteries about the founding of The College of William and Mary concerns the origin of the college's surviving ancient sundial: Did the king and queen give it to the college in 1693 or did the Rev. James Blair or some other college official order it or bring it from London?
I asked these questions recently of retired W&M; physics professor George Crawford, who has dealt with experts in Great Britain and America about the oddly engraved metal dial face now exhibited in the college's Earl Gregg Swem Library. A copy is displayed at the center of a floral planting on the campus mall between the library and the Andrews fine arts building.
Crawford, a mathematician and physicist, believes the calibration of the dial and its choice of Barbados as one of its time references indicate it was expressly made for Williamsburg, probably for William and Mary.
Presumably, it provided the hourly readings that told the early college when to toll the class bell. Clocks and watches were few in 1693, and tiny Middle Plantation may have needed a timepiece to set the hours for church and college functions.
The first known reference to the sundial is a cryptic college memo reprinted in the William and Mary Quarterly reading "The dial post in front of the President's House was put down on the 15th day of April, 1815." Professor Crawford points out that this was one day after John Augustine Smith became president of W&M.; As the college's first scientist president, Smith perhaps found the sundial unused at the college and had it scientifically positioned outside his house to give him and the college the correct time.
"Presumably," writes Crawford, "the sundial had been moved from the campus for protection during the War of 1812." But no one knows for sure.
Crawford points out that W&M;'s sundial contains additional readings, engraved on its face, showing the time in London, Vienna, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Barbados and Mexico. The time differences between these localities are shown correctly on the W&M; sundial when it is placed at the latitude and longitude - Williamsburg - for which it was designed.
Experts in England and Williamsburg say the dial plate engravings indicate it was made in the late 1600s or early 1700s. The metal gnonom, or hour hand, of the sundial has disappeared over the years, but Professor Crawford has made a replacement, which is used on the replica sundial. With this addition, Crawford checked the sundial's readings and found them substantially correct for Williamsburg and Barbados.
Two experts have helped the college learn more about its early treasure. They are Jay Gaynor, curator of mechanical arts at Colonial Williamsburg, and Professor G.I.E. Turner, curator emeritus of the Oxford Museum in England. "Their independent conclusions," says Crawford, "were that the sundial was probably made in London in the late 17th or early 18th century, and since there is proof it was made for the vicinity of Williamsburg, it most likely was made for use at the college when chartered, or soon thereafter."
Lacking documentation, college officials wonder if it may have been given by King William and Queen Mary and brought to Williamsburg in 1693, when President Blair returned from London to Jamestown with the college's charter. However, Jay Gaynor believes the absence of an inscription on the dial "suggests that it was not a presentation piece but more likely a piece purchased by the college (or some other Eastern Virginia user) with utilitarian intent."
In a letter from Oxford, Professor Turner expresses belief that "the maker was in London. ... I do not believe the dial could have been made in America."
He adds, "You have proof that the latitude of the dial is just right for Williamsburg, and that the longitude is, too. Therefore, it must have been bespoke [made to a customer's order]. I think it not inconceivable that this dial was made for the college about the time of its charter in 1693, or alternatively for the governor or some other person in a position of power or wealth. ..."
In a letter to the board of W&M; in 1859, ex-professor William Barton Rogers wrote that "the dial kept its place" despite the 1858 fire that half-destroyed the Wren Building. During the Civil War, the sundial was removed and taken north by Chaplain William H. Glider of the 40th New York Regiment, but in 1889 it was returned by his children to the college.
It was placed in front of the President's House where it stood for years, but was later moved to the yard behind the Wren Building. An aerial photograph of the campus taken about 1918 clearly shows the sundial there.
Besides the replica of the sundial on the mall, the college also has another replica, given by the class of 1937, and it sits in front of the Alumni House.
Probably more than you needed or wanted to know about the sundial, but this kind of serendipitous “find” is the reason why I write these essays.
As I have been writing these “Campus Tour” essays over the past couple of months, I have enjoyed learning more about parts of the campus I thought I knew well. I wasn’t sure about including Small Hall in “my” campus tour, because it was pretty peripheral to my life on campus. I’ve glad I decided to include it, because it allowed me to understand a professor I have never thought very much about.
Like an idiot, I didn't take baby calculus in college; I took engineering calculus. I quickly dropped the class. They didn't offer physics in my high school, just chemistry, so it didn't cross my mind to take physics in college. I'm a social science creature.
Football physics aka physics for poets, in some schools