Benedictine Hall is located on the Green Campus of

Oklahoma Baptist University Oklahoma Baptist University (OBU) is a private Baptist university in Shawnee, Oklahoma. It was established in 1910 under the original name of The Baptist University of Oklahoma. OBU is owned and was founded by the Baptist General Convention of ...

Shawnee, Oklahoma Shawnee () is a city in and the county seat of Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma, Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma, United States. The population was 29,857 in 2010, a 4.9 percent increase from the figure of 28,692 in 2000. The city is part of the Oklah ...

. It was the central feature of the now-closed St. Gregory's University (also known as St. Gregory's Abbey and College), housing its administration, library and most of its classes. Designed by St. Louis architect Victor Klutho, the facility opened in the fall of 1915. St. Gregory's College grew from the Sacred Heart Mission in

Sacred Heart, Oklahoma Sacred Heart is a small unincorporated community in Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma, United States. Established in 1879 by Father Isidore Robot as a Catholic mission on the old Pottawatomie reserve, it was originally named ''Sacred Heart Missio ...

. Established in 1876 in what was then called Indian Territory, the mission school considered moving to a more populated area in the 1890s. After a 1901 fire that destroyed much of what was then called the "Catholic

University of Oklahoma The University of Oklahoma (OU) is a Public university, public research university in Norman, Oklahoma, United States. Founded in 1890, it had existed in Oklahoma Territory near Indian Territory for 17 years before the two territories became the ...

", the decision was made to move the high school and college to Shawnee, to the north. Viktor Klutho was hired to design the new facility. A specialist in

Tudor revival Tudor Revival architecture, also known as mock Tudor in the UK, first manifested in domestic architecture in the United Kingdom in the latter half of the 19th century. Based on revival of aspects that were perceived as Tudor architecture, in rea ...

architecture, Klutho designed a massive five-story brick building to combine church, school and abbey in a single edifice, opening to 40 boys in the fall term of 1915. This served until the 1940s when a new church was built nearby, and in the 1950s the

abbey An abbey is a type of monastery used by members of a religious order under the governance of an abbot or abbess. Abbeys provide a complex of buildings and land for religious activities, work, and housing of Christians, Christian monks and nun ...

moved to a new campus adjoining the school. In the 1960s the school discontinued high school education and admitted women to the college.

Description

The college required a fireproof structure, so the new school was built of

reinforced concrete Reinforced concrete, also called ferroconcrete or ferro-concrete, is a composite material in which concrete's relatively low tensile strength and ductility are compensated for by the inclusion of reinforcement having higher tensile strength or ...

, and surplus railroad rails from the

Rock Island Railroad The original Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad (CRI&P RW, sometimes called ''Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway'') was an American Class I railroad. It was also known as the Rock Island Line, or, in its final years, The Rock. At ...

used in the foundation. The concrete walls were faced with brick, with stone accents. The building is a solid rectangle with a footprint of by . The central portion of the building is expressed as a battlemented tower, four stories high over a raised basement, with slender corner turrets. From the main mass on either side extend four-story wings on raised basements, accented by projecting three-story oriel bays. The top of the wing is accentuated by a segmental

balustrade A baluster () is an upright support, often a vertical moulded shaft, square, or lathe-turned form found in stairways, parapets, and other architectural features. In furniture construction it is known as a spindle. Common materials used in its ...

. The main level contained administrative offices and the main entry. The second floor was occupied by the library. The third floor was classroom space and the fourth floor was reserved for science laboratories and classrooms. The large space within the fifth floor tower was originally a gymnasium, now a lecture hall. The basement housed support facilities. In 1967, a proposal to demolish the building was rejected due to the potential costs to raze such a solid structure. It was renovated, adding a T-section concrete stair tower to the exterior of the west side. The building housed most of what became St. Gregory University's classes.

2011 Oklahoma earthquake

Benedictine Hall was damaged by the

2011 Oklahoma earthquake The 2011 Oklahoma earthquake was a 5.7 Moment magnitude scale, magnitude intraplate earthquake which occurred near Prague, Oklahoma on November 5 at 10:53 p.m. CDT (03:53 UTC November 6) in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. ...

. One turret collapsed immediately following the quake. In the days that followed the earthquake, one of the turrets had to be pushed down, and the other two were removed brick by brick. More than 3,400 donors from around the world contributed roughly $2.5 million to help the school reconstruct the turrets. Timberlake Construction and Advanced Masonry, both of Oklahoma City, were charged with the task of rebuilding the turrets – this time with steel "bones" that could withstand an earthquake. The decorative aspects of the towers were faithfully recreated. The brick was matched to the rest of the building, and the

grotesques Since at least the 18th century (in French and German, as well as English), grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus ...

and shields that were part of the original gothic architecture were molded in the exact image of their predecessors. The new turrets were officially blessed during Homecoming on November 9, 2013.

Sale of the building

In December of 2018 the sale to

Hobby Lobby Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., formerly Hobby Lobby Creative Centers, is an American retail company. It owns a chain of arts and crafts stores with a volume of over $5 billion in 2018. The chain has 1,001 stores in 48 U.S. states. The Green family fo ...

of the Shawnee campus of St. Gregory's University, including Benedictine Hall, was approved by the bankruptcy court. The campus was leased to

, a private Christian liberal arts university in Shawnee. In May of 2019, OBU renamed the tract as the OBU Green Campus, both in honor of the

Green Green is the color between cyan and yellow on the visible spectrum. It is evoked by light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 495570 nm. In subtractive color systems, used in painting and color printing, it is created by a com ...

family, owners of Hobby Lobby, and because the color green is one of OBU’s official university colors. In December of 2019, Hobby Lobby and the Green family donated the campus to OBU.

Historic listing

As part of the former St. Gregory’s Abbey and College, Benedictine Hall is on the

National Register of Historic Places listings in Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma __NOTOC__ This is a list of the National Register of Historic Places listings in Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma. This is intended to be a complete list of the properties and districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Pottawatomie ...

References

{{NRHP in Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma School buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in Oklahoma School buildings completed in 1915 Buildings and structures in Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma Tudor Revival architecture in Oklahoma St. Gregory's University National Register of Historic Places in Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma 1915 establishments in Oklahoma