Donaldson Hall has a long history at Northern

By Kelsey Doncaster

One of the most recent projects of the Havre-Hill County Historic Preservation Commission was a collaboration with Montana State University-Northern to nominate Donaldson Hall to the National Register of Historic Places. The National Register is the official list of historic properties worthy of preservation. They hired me, Kelsey Doncaster of Doncaster Consulting in Choteau, Montana, to complete this nomination.

In completing a National Register nomination many hours are spent in the research process, finding primary documents. In this project, I found a treasure trove in the archives of MSU-Northern. There were boxes and boxes of documents, the NoMoCo - Northern's student newspaper, correspondence and drawings of the development, funding, construction, and use of Northern Montana College Girls Residence Hall, known today as Donaldson Hall. As a historian, I like to unearth interesting details about a property that are unknown to the general public. Here are a few I found about Donaldson Hall.

Donaldson Hall represented the first truly new building constructed on the Northern Montana College campus with all new materials and furnishings, sponsored through a Public Works Administration grant and loan. This was a self-liquidating project, which would incur no cost to the state or the taxpayers for the building's construction.

Donaldson Hall was constructed from 1935-1936 by Lovering & Longbotham of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Additional contracts for the interior were won by firms such as Havre's own F.A. Buttrey Company, which provided 17 rugs for the furnishings. Buttrey also provided all of the furniture for the girls' dormitory rooms and the recreation room.

The original paint colors for each room varied from floor to floor, with colors such as mist gray, dawn gray, light buff, and ivory. The solid oak doors were built with Airolite Louvers instead of the traditional transom for ventilation. The original Edge-Lite black enameled mirrors with movable lights from the Faries Manufacturing Company in Decatur, Illinois still exist in most rooms. A buzzer system to notify students of calling visitors is still intact in places.

Total capacity for the residence hall eventually yielded 100 students and four rooms for college staff. Room and board in the 1930s cost $23 a month per student with a $5 reservation fee. A list of students from the 1940s living at Donaldson Hall represented all of Montana, not just the 16 counties Northern served, but also from places like Anaconda, Belgrade, Deer Lodge, Harrison, Helena, Kalispell, Lewistown, and Wibaux. There were even students from other states such as Indiana, Washington State, and Washington D.C.

From 1936-1942, Donaldson was the only dining hall on campus. After 1942, it still served only women, until 1958, when Morgan Hall's dining hall was completed, and Donaldson's dining hall closed. A sampling of menus from the dining hall from 1936 to 1949 show that meals varied and reflected the times. Breakfast sometimes consisted of hot or cold cereals like Farina or Maple Squares, but more unusual dishes such as Welch rarebit on toast were served for lunch, or tongue with raisin sauce for dinner.

April 11, 1951, the Montana State Board of Education re-named Northern Montana College Girls Residence Hall to Donaldson Hall, after a former Northern Montana College professor, Jannette Donaldson, who taught at Northern Montana College for 12 years.

When any building or structure is nominated to the National Register, those nominating the property have to prove and defend to the Montana State Historic Preservation Office, Montana State Preservation Review Board and the Keeper of the National Register in Washington, D.C, the reasons the property is eligible. It is not an easy process which involves many hours of work through intensive research, photography, drawings and writing that is compiled into the form, reviewed multiple times by these agencies, and then defended in person. Donaldson Hall was listed in the National Register under Criteria A and C on April 4, 2024.

Under Criterion A, the construction of Donaldson Hall expressed the college's serious intent to provide quality higher education to Montana's northern region students by providing accommodations for them on the campus. The building also represents a direct connection to Depression-era programs of the time like the PWA, and that program's investment in communities in Montana. The PWA significantly stimulated the private sector economy while the United States was enmeshed in the Great Depression. Without the PWA, the college lacked the resources to construct such a building.

Donaldson Hall was also listed under Criterion C for its architecture. It was designed by local Havre Architect Frank Bossuot in the Collegiate Gothic style. Collegiate Gothic was used for university and secondary school buildings as a new adaptation of Gothic Revival style. Donaldson Hall still retains all of the original design elements including the oriel bay windows, a steeply pitched cross-gable roof, decorative finials, and a Gothic arch main entrance to name just a few.