Isaac C. Ketler Hall wasn’t the first on-campus housing option for men, but it is the oldest remaining one.
Built in 1932, it is named for the College’s founder and first president. A teacher and educational visionary, Isaac C. Ketler built Grove City College from the ground up. Ketler was hired in 1876 to run a small-town preparatory school with 13 students and, within a decade, transformed it into a college and established a Christ-centered, academically sound, and affordable approach to higher education that has endured and succeeded for 150 years.
His namesake building was dedicated by his son Weir C. Ketler, the College’s third president, who noted that construction during the Great Depression kept cost down and provided much-need work for local laborers. MORE>>
At the time, most men lived off campus in rented rooms or in Memorial Hall, the College’s lone dormitory for men, which was built in 1916 and razed and replaced with the current building in the 1990s.
Ketler Hall was designed in accordance with the Olmsted Brothers plan for upper campus, which called for men’s dorms on one side and women’s on the other. The College stuck with that approach as it grew over the 20th century and three new men’s residence halls were constructed to the south of Ketler, adjacent to the site of Memorial Hall.
Built in the collegiate gothic style, with an imposing brick façade, stairways, and arches, Ketler Hall is an architectural gem that embodies the overall aesthetic ethos of the College.
Its ground floor entryway, the Oak Room, is a paneled chamber featuring an ornate fireplace with a carving of the College seal and stained-glass windows. It opens into Ketler Rec, a large meeting and activity room that was once a dining hall for men before co-ed dining was established.
The upper floors are home to about 200 students, members of fraternities and housing groups, and unaffiliated men. In earlier years, it housed freshman men who felt it their duty to yell “Get Off the Quad” to those who mistakenly walked on the hallowed grass. Their shared experiences within its walls mirror in many ways that of their predecessors over the past nine decades. Living and learning together, enjoying good times, supporting each other through bad, and strengthening their character and their faith to forge a community.