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Mars Hill's Forgotten Pool
by Jared Cohn
Click photos to enlarge
The McConnell Pool is one of Mars Hill College's forgotten secrets*
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Coming off a win in their inaugural home opener, the lady lions swim team will
be celebrating in their own Harrell Pool this week. But did you know that long before Harrell Pool was built in 1967, another pool lay beneath McConnell?
Underneath what is now the new clogging studio there is a pool - not a very large
pool, 20 by 70 feet, with a little more then a few feet on either side of
it for a teacher/coach to walk on. “It wasn’t that large, but it
was big enough for us at the time,” says Virginia Hart.
Hart, for whom the Hart Tennis Center is named, was a physical education teacher
at Mars Hill College from 1945 until 1985. Early in her career she taught upper
level women’s swimming classes.
"After the pool was shut down," recalls Hart, "they built a floor over the pool." Today that space is used by the cloggers. Our world-renowned cloggers are clogging away atop
some forgotten history of Mars Hill College.
A group of Mars Hill's lady swimmers*
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| * These photos courtesy of the Appalachian Archives, Liston B. Ramsey Center for Regional Studies, Mars Hill College |
Hart says, “I can remember that all around the pool were pipes used to
heat the pool, and if you weren’t careful, you could easily burn yourself
on the pipes.” These pipes would cause steam, and the steam would rise
to the ceiling. Above the pool was the basketball court, and the steam was starting
to cause the floor to warp. When the floor started to warp, dust and debris
would fall into the pool, resulting in a constant struggle of pool clean-up
and drainage.
“The water would get pretty dirty," recalls Hart, and the pool didn’t
have an automatic filtering system. If you wanted to drain the pool, you would have to open the drain, and then when you wanted it to be filled back up, you would have to turn on the water. All this had to be done manually. “That is what caused the pool to be closed down more than anything else
that happened,” Hart says.
Virginia Hart, top left, with a group of students - from The Laurel, 1947 |
When she says “more then anything else that happened,” Hart is referring
to the unfortunate drowning accident of a student. One day Hart was getting
ready to begin class when “A student dove into the pool and came back
up to the surface and told me that there was a body at the bottom of the pool.
So I ran around to the other side of the pool so I could see into the pool all
the way to the bottom, and I saw his body.”
She learned later that he was part of the men’s swim class before hers, but no one was able to determine exactly what had happened. He was from Cuba, and his family, living so far away, had to be notified. Hart went to a Wednesday night prayer service later and says she couldn't close her eyes without seeing that form at the bottom.
The prayer service was held in what is now Owen Theatre. That building was Mars Hill Baptist Church until it was bought by the college in 1954. Junior Ashley McCauley says the student who found the body was her grandmother.
Hart does not believe the drowning to be the reason the pool was closed down, “It’s
a horrible thing when someone dies,” she says, but she compares it to
a highway accident. “You’re not going to close down 19-23 when someone
has an accident on it and dies. It was an accident, and I don’t think
they would close down the pool because of it.”
So now the pool at the bottom of McConnell sits alone with no water in it, forgotten
by the past and not known by many. A part of Mars Hill College history has been
covered up to make way for more history-in-the-making with our clogging team.
Hart says, “It wasn’t the ideal swimming pool…. but we loved
it.”
Reader Comment:
Abby DeBusk, Junior 11/22/2005, 11:26 a.m.
Very interesting story!! I wonder what else is on this campus that very few people know about? Thanks for letting us know about the forgotten history of this school!!! Good job!
EDITOR'S NOTE: 2/2/2006 --- Virginia Hart contacted Hilltop to offer a few corrections and to clarify parts of the interview with her: The pool, she says, was not like pools today, which have automatic filtering systems. On the other hand, filling it "manually" didn't mean people were running around with buckets and hoses. It did have a drain, which had to be opened. Water pipes were built into the pool, and it filled automatically when the water was turned on.
When the decision was made to close the pool, Hart says, it was covered with a floor and the space was used first as a gym for physical education classes. Then it was used for a while as a curriculum lab. Education offices were located where the dressing rooms had been. Only years later did the cloggers begin to use that space.
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