The 1910s at WVU
Most WVU students continued to live in boarding houses, sometimes sleeping (rooming) in one house and eating (boarding) in another; thus, like today, they had to pay for room and board. WVU required that the owners or operators of the boarding houses enforce certain regulations for female students, including curfews that prohibited women from staying out too late at night. WVU opened its first residence hall in 1919—Woman’s Hall (now Stalnaker Hall, named for a longtime professor of psychology Elizabeth Mattingly Stalnaker).
As early as 1909, freshman males were required to wear “freshman beanies” on and off campus. According to Brad Laidley, a history major who graduated in 1915, “Anybody caught without it, they would deal with him accordingly.”
On May 6, 1918, students voted to create a student governing organization to be led by the president of the student body. This student governing body became today’s Board of Governors and Student Administration.
Students looking for careers as teachers could work with “equipment for mental testing and measuring and for psychological experiments” in a lab in Woodburn Hall, sharing space in the building with the History, English, Latin, and Spanish classrooms; women’s gym (in the basement); Zoology lab; School of Medicine; School of Music; Law School; Registrar’s Office; telephone switchboard; and bookstore, among others.
Our records are not clear, but it is possible that the first female international students were two women from Serbia who enrolled in WVU in the fall of 1919 to study agriculture; they did not complete the school year.
Mechanic Arts Workshop, 1912-13
Thomas Eward Hodges, a former Arts and Sciences faculty member, became president of the University in 1911, with President William Howard Taft on campus for the inauguration. (source)