As alien as the situation would seem to us today, for most of the first 100 years of Averett's existence, the bulk of the faculty and staff lived on campus in the dorms alongside students.  U.S. Census information dating back to the late 1800s lists Averett's old Patton Street building as the residence of numerous faculty.  More recently, Averett contracts preserved by Dean and History teacher Mary Fugate indicate that she was receiving “room and board” as part of her compensation into the early 1950s.

While this may seem strange to us, there was a very simple reason for faculty to live on campus.  In these years the faculty were, by and large, not Danville residents.  They would come to campus for nine months of work and then return to their homes for the summer.  On-campus housing was, thus, a path of least resistance to encourage desirable faculty to sign contracts.

For numerous years between the late 1920s and the early 1940s (coincidentally, these years overlap almost exactly with the Great Depression), Dean Fugate's student enrollment folders contain housing information.  Though often incomplete, these files allow us a glimpse into the lived experience of faculty room and board.

In this analysis, I will focus on Main Hall, as information for Danville Hall room assignments is largely nonexistent, and the “Annex” - now called Davenport Hall - is no longer recognizable after numerous renovations.

Main Hall's dorm rooms have always been restricted to the 2nd and 3rd floor.  In the years between 1911 (when it was first opened) and the end of faculty room and board, the 1st floor and basement were predominantly reserved for group usage space (dining hall, auditorium, library, classrooms, etc).

During the 1928-29 school year, faculty housing on the two upper floors was organized like this:

It should be clear from this image that faculty spaces were quite well defined at this point.  Aside from the Nurse, who roomed in the vicinity of the Infirmary, faculty housing in Main Hall was restricted to the 2nd floor.  Faculty also tended to receive corner locations (Willeford, Bryan, and Alderson), and/or be housed on the side of the building facing the street.  Voice teacher Laura Fuessel - who clearly received outsized consideration - was even given an entire converted classroom for her living space.  The only anomaly here is room 29.  Rationally, Virginia Harper would make more sense in a corner room.  However, in later years room 29 was used as a storage closet, so there may have been something especially undesirable about that particular location even in these early years.

The following year, little changed.  Three of the faculty rooms on the 2nd floor were given over to students, while the faculty move over to the Annex, but otherwise the clear organizational pattern remained: 2nd floor restriction, and corner placement in most cases.

By 1932-33, with the Depression in full swing, the system began to show some strain:

Note that faculty at this point were being encouraged to double-up on room occupancy wherever possible.  Faculty with daughters in attendance (i.e. Mrs. H.D. Callison) were sharing rooms with their children.  Meanwhile, sisters Mary and Elizabeth Fugate also voluntarily shared a room.  Additionally, faculty placement in rooms on the right side of the 2nd floor had lost coherence by this point, and appear to have been assigned almost at random.  The 3rd floor had also been penetrated by two faculty.  Although the preference for corners and the street-facing side of the building remains, Langston was also placed seemingly at random in the middle of the hall.

By 1936-37, the pattern was clearly becoming difficult for the school to maintain in the face of other pressures:

Fuessel and Mary Fugate remained in the same locations, as did the Nurse (more or less), and Elizabeth Fugate was given a room of her own next door to her sister (though not the corner room).  The preference for the southwest corner grew to occupy four rooms.  But the other positions were unpredictable and seemingly chosen from leftovers.  Indeed, the notation for Miss Hart's room (53) indicates that she wasn't even guaranteed the space, and that it would only be her room "if left open" after student rooms were assigned.

By the 1940-41 school year, very little had changed - predominantly the same faculty and staff were in the same rooms where they had lived in 1936.  Notable in this year is that the archives has preserved a complete list of faculty indicating that nearly half (12 of 27) were by that point living in their own houses rather than in dormitory space.  The ever increasing size of the faculty - clearly visible in the growing number of occupied rooms - had already pushed many off campus entirely.

Although we do not have a faculty residence document for later years, it is clear from student rosters that, by the early 1940s, faculty had been pulled out of Main Hall entirely and were rooming elsewhere.  A student roster from 1943-44 produces this result (hats indicate known student rooms):

Although we have an oddity (there are students listed for room 45, which does not appear to exist), students were placed in almost every single room aside from the classrooms and the rooms traditionally reserved for the Infirmary (46, 47, 48, 50) or storage (29).  Room 57 is the only other unknown.

While I have not produced occupancy maps for the Annex, similar patterns are visible in that location in the same time frame.  In late 1920s charts, faculty were predominantly clustered into four rooms in a corner on the second floor.  By 1932-33, half of them were gone and the layout was unpredictable, with faculty rooms seemingly placed at random, and double occupancy in at least one instance (Dorothy Shipman rooming with Ruth Rice).  By 1936-37, only one room in the annex remained a staff room, and that one was occupied by Madie Lee Walker, the school's Dean of Women (an administrative position very closely tied to student life and thus easier to defend as an inclusion in dorm space).  She remained the only staffer in the Annex as late as 1940-41.

While it isn't clear exactly where the faculty went, presumably they slowly transitioned to being full-time Danville residents and began taking up permanent residence in nearby houses and apartments.  While that process was clearly well underway by 1940, it is unclear when it became standard practice for most employees.

For a brief period of time, then, the lived experience of campus would have included an obvious and large presence of faculty.  For many years, between 25% and 33% of the 2nd floor would have been faculty housing.  In the mid-1930s, and lingering in most locations into the mid-1940s, every floor of every building would have had between one and seven faculty in residence.  This would obviously have been very different from the modern sense of dorms as a space geared towards and dominated by students.  In the first half of the 20th century, both the students and the faculty would have led lives that were intertwined - as both surrounded each other and dealt with similar issues in not only their school schedules but also their day-to-day lives.