You wouldn’t know to look at it, but the dazzling new Ohio Union has nearly a century of history behind it.

Ohio State “blazed the trail” for student unions, said Barbie Tootle, an alumnus who has researched their history.

A historical marker near the original Ohio Union, now Enarson Hall, notes that the building opened in 1911 “with considerable fanfare” as the first such facility at a public university and the fourth in the nation. 

In erecting a student union, the marker says, “the university gave official sanction to extracurricular activities.”

“The whole idea of unions was just in its infancy when [the first Ohio Union] was built,” Tootle said. “We were in the vanguard of saying, ‘We need a place for students to go.’”

Male students, that is. The board of trustees approved the project in order to “promote good fellowship among the men of the university.” 

Because campus was fairly isolated from the rest of the city at the time, the union provided much-needed services.

 
“It had a barbershop, it had billiards,” Tootle said. “It was like a men’s club of the day.”      

Edward S. “Beanie” Drake, who was hired as manager in 1913, “really put us on the map in terms of our leadership in the union movement,” Tootle said. Curious about what other universities were doing, he summoned leaders from Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Purdue, Wisconsin, and Case School of Applied Sciences (now Case Western) to Ohio State to share their ideas about unions. The schools formed the National Association of Student Unions, and Drake served as secretary through 1933. 

In 1922, the group added two Canadian universities and became the Association of College Unions International. There now are more than 550 university members. Drake has been immortalized in
the naming of Drake Union, which opened in 1972 on the banks of the Olentangy River, and with a bronze bust commissioned for the new Ohio Union.

‘Ladylike places’

Women were allowed in the original union only once a week; even then, they had to enter through a back door. They responded with a reciprocal policy in 1922, when the Women’s Building, later renamed Pomerene Hall, opened.

The impetus behind the new facility was the hiring of a dean of women students in 1911. Among her duties, Tootle said, was to establish “suitable, ladylike places—safe, where the gentler sex could be looked after.” The Women’s Building fit the bill. “It was gracious, beautiful, certainly a very, very pretty building,” Tootle said.

The building had a pool, a gym, and locker rooms, in keeping with increasing interest in women’s fitness and the realization that “women would not faint from physical activity,” Tootle said. Later, Pomerene Refectory opened, providing food service through the nearby School of Home Economics.

During World War II, women on campus took on activities usually dominated by men. Not surprisingly, they were reluctant to fade into the background with the postwar influx of returning GIs. 

The men’s and women’s unions reflected the changing times when they opened their lounges to members of the opposite sex in 1945. And when the next Ohio Union opened six years later, it welcomed everyone.

“The new union was symbolically the end of that separation,” Tootle said.

In 2007, that no-longer-new building was demolished to make way for its latest incarnation.

Even before the new Ohio Union opened to the public on Mar. 29, other universities had requested tours of the building. Director Tracy Stuck said that’s as it should be.