Photograph courtesy of Dickinson
College Archives The photograph above shows the dining room in Drayer
Hall, the first all women's dormitory built on the main campus in 1952,
where College women ate three meals a day. For ten years from 1952,
the tradition there was to have a family style meal where everyone would
arrive at the same time and everyone would leave at the same time.
A waiter would be assigned to each table. In 1962, the meal plan
was changed to cafeteria style for lunch and breakfast, and family style
for dinner. The waiters in the picture are students. It can
thus be assumed that lunch or dinner is pictured here because every
girl is wearing a skirt. The dress code for the Drayer Dining Hall
is as follows: For Breakfast and Saturday lunch, a girl could wear
either a skirt, bermuda shorts, or slacks. For Lunch and Dinner skirts
would be worn. For Sunday night Dinner, skirts, nylons, and heels
were required to be worn. In the period of growth following World War II, Dickinson College
wanted to increase the number of women enrolled in the college, and as
a result, decided to build an all women's dormitory to replace the inconvenient
and outdated Metzger Hall and thereby attract more women students.
Built on the Moore side of the campus, it housed 125 students. The
building was equipped with a main lounge for formal entertainment and smaller,
informal lounges on each floor for the students' study and leisure.
Drayer also contained an infirmary, two apartments for the House Directors,
a laundry and pressing room on each floor, and a self serving elevator.1
Drayer Hall A Room In Drayer Hall
The Drayer Dining Hall had its own kitchen where food was prepared
exclusively for Drayer dining. The kitchen facilities were equipped
to serve a maximum of three hundred people, but the Dining Hall could only
hold two hundred people at one time. Dickinson College owned
the food system but it was run by the Slater Food system. A food
director was responsible for the service and a purchasing agent was in
charge of securing the food. Food was shipped to the school on a
weekly basis.2 The Drayer Dining Hall, the Morgan Dining Hall, and the Metzger
Dining Hall were all discontinued and renovated with the introduction of
the Holland Union Building in 1964. The Dining Hall was moved to
the HUB so both the student body and food service could be more unified.
The HUB Dining Hall could seat a thousand people and the location was more
centralized for everyone. 3 In 1965, the Drayer Dining Hall
was converted into more dormitory rooms and the College Health center.4Now, Drayer still rests in the same place, but, with this convered space
where once the women of Dickinson dined together, it can house a maximum
of 181 students.
Beth McGuiness
Notes: 1). Sellers,
Charles Coleman. Dickinson College: A History. Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973, p. 590.
2). Treasurer
Files on Drayer Hall, Box 23, #4 and 5, Dickinson College Archives.
3). Treasurer
Files on The Holland Union Building,
Dickinson College Archives.
4).Sellers,
p. 596.
