Venable Hall

Venable Hall (1825) is a dormitory at Hampden–Sydney College in southside Virginia. Built in sections from 1824–1830, Venable Hall is the second oldest dormitory on Hampden–Sydney's campus. The building is listed in the Virginia Landmarks Register (1969) and on the National Register of Historic Places (1970) as a contributing property to Hampden–Sydney College Historic District.

History

Construction of Venable Hall began in 1824 and was completed in three separate phases by 1830. The building was designed and constructed by Dabney Cosby (from Raleigh, North Carolina) in the Federal style of architecture and designed to complement Cushing Hall.

When completed in 1830, the building was the home of the Union Theological Seminary. Venable Hall provided the first Presbyterian seminary in the South and eventually became the head institution of the Southern Presbyterian Church. The seminary existed in Hampden–Sydney until 1898 when it moved to its current location in Richmond.

Subsequent to the Seminary's move to Richmond, Major Richard Venable, Hampden–Sydney Class of 1857, bought its buildings for $10,000 and gave them to the College, doubling the size of the campus. Named in his honor, Venable Hall is now a residence hall and contains the Parents & Friends Lounge, the former Seminary chapel. Graduation, typically held in May, is conducted in the front lawn of Venable Hall.

Hall

In architecture, a hall is a relatively large space enclosed by a roof and walls. In the Iron Age, a mead hall was such a simple building and was the residence of a lord and his retainers. Later, rooms were partitioned from it, and the space next to the front door became the entrance hall. Today, the (entrance) hall of a house is the space next to the front door or vestibule leading to the rooms directly and/or indirectly. Where the hall inside the front door of a house is elongated, it may be called a passage, corridor (from Spanish corredor used in El Escorial and 100 years later in Castle Howard) or hallway.

Other meanings

The term hall is often used to designate a British or Irish country house such as a hall house, or specifically a Wealden hall house, and manor houses.

In later medieval Europe, the main room of a castle or manor house was the great hall. In a medieval building, the hall was where the fire was kept. With time, its functions as dormitory, kitchen, parlour and so on were divided off to separate rooms or, in the case of the kitchen, a separate building.

Hall (disambiguation)

Hall can mean:

Places

Arctic

Austria

Australia

Germany

Ireland

Sweden

United States

Hall (cyclecar)

The Hall Cycle and Plating company was a maker of Cycle cars in Waco, Texas from 1914-1915.

History

In 1914, a man named John B. Fisher designed a cyclecar for the Hall Cycle and Plating Company. It had an underslung frame.Lawrence Hall, president of the company, did a test run from Waco to Dallas, covering 104 miles while consuming only 2.5 gallons of gasoline. The cyclecar had a 4-cylinder, 18 hp engine(the prototype only had a two-cylinder engine) with a 100" wheelbase. The company reorganized in 1915 as the Hall Motor car Company. Production ended in 1915, and Lawrence Hall moved to Los Angeles.

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