102
Years
A Story of the First Century of the Vanderbilt University
School of Engineering
1875 - 1975
By DILLARD JACOBS
VANDERBILT ENGINEERING ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
Nashville • 1975
Chapter 7
A Camp on the Mountain
The one thing next to the heart of Dean Lewis was the surveying camp. He had sought it as soon as he joined the faculty; in 1927 he established the first off-campus camp in rented facilities on Bon Air Mountain, about 90 miles east of Nashville. Finally in 1931 he was able to purchase the W. J. Cummins property on the crest of the mountain. The property was named Camp Schuerman in 1940. By 1947, when an extensive article about the camp appeared in the Nashville Tennessean , the paper was able to report it was “among the best practical training grounds of its kind in the nation.”
Yet the camp was more than just a practical training ground. It had its detractors (among these were the budget officers of the university, for it was an added expense to the school); yet it was a laboratory that Lewis used to educate the whole man, to develop teamwork and the ability to work with others.
The camp property included 50 acres of land and the former summer residences of J. M. Dickinson and Jesse M. Overton. The price was $17,500 of which Mr. Cummins donated $7,500. Through contacts made by Dr. E. E. Litkenhous, 350 additional acres were obtained at nominal cost from Tennessee Products and Chemical Corporation about 1946.
The dean worked his boys hard at surveying camp but took care of them royally. He was nearly always on hand and there was plenty of fine, nourishing food prepared by Andrew Hendon, chef at McTyeire Hall and acknowledged best cook on campus. The resident caretaker, Casto Sapp, was the dean's right hand man insofar as other camp matters were concerned.
In 1947 the daily schedule was rigid and demanding:
- 7:00 breakfast
- 8:00-12:00 survey in the field
- 12:00-1:00 lunch
- 1:00-5:00 survey
- 5:00-6:00 games
- 6:00 supper
- 7:30-10:00 classes in theory for those who needed them (this included make-up math)
The indoor work of preparing maps was largely reserved for the rare days of inclement weather.
But times and curricula change. The engineer of today must learn more complicated things than how to run a straight line through a blackberry thicket, so the camp was sold in 1960 after Lewis's death. Surveying now takes place on the campus, as it did in the beginning. Something has changed, though; there are now women students in the surveying crews.
The camp still serves as a source of nostalgic stories whenever old grads of the era get together.
Abe Davis and John Herbert of the class of 1930 chased a pig until it crawled under Professor Warren Coolidge's tent and died. It was not found until three days later.
Bruce Carney, also of the class of 1930, used a carpenter's pencil to short out the spark plugs of Professor Coolidge's Chevy so he would have to walk into the field with them instead of riding. Strange to say, however, the car always ran well when the students borrowed it to ride into Sparta at night. Two things resulted: “Coolidge lost 35 pounds in three weeks before he found out what was happening; thereafter night classes were substituted for rides into Sparta.” Tom Whitsitt '32 won the special design competition in the freshman drawing class in 1929. The prize was to have his design of a four-holer constructed at the camp, held that year at the Girl Scout's camp at Ridgetop.
W. F. Wright had an unforgettable experience in 1939 as an undergraduate student assistant and instructor. Wright has always been a stickler for precision and followed the practice at surveying camp of kicking over any surveying stake he found not properly marked. He soon found himself tied in a gunny sack and deposited under a cold shower. Professor Coolidge was the laughing rescuer.
Then there was the big school bus theft of 1939. Joe Cathcart, who graduated as a GI in 1948, was then a freshman and tells the story: “About thirty of us were coming back to camp after a weekend and got off the bus at Sparta for a little beer at Young's Cafe. We met a school bus driver at the bar and we each offered to buy him a beer if he would drive us up to the camp in the school bus. He agreed but it turned out he couldn't hold thirty beers, so we just borrowed his keys and took off in the bus. We didn't get far before we were arrested for ‘stealing a school bus.’ Dean Lewis had to bail us out and we were rewarded with a stern lecture.”
Bob Bibb '43 tells of the time in 1940 when some of the students invented a diversion of going down to Sunset Rock at night to annoy spooning couples in automobiles. One night two of them, Sid Hailey and Paul Youngblood, jumped on the bumpers of a car and started to rock it. The driver came out shooting, and both boys jumped down a rockfill to escape. Hailey hit his head on a rock and was knocked out. Everyone thought he had been shot and killed. They took him back to the bunkhouse, laid him out, and covered him with a sheet. He came to and started moaning just as Professor Coolidge entered the room. Only then did anyone think to attend to his injuries. They examined him, found no bullet holes, and bandaged his head.
Clark Akers, Jr. was a young freshman in 1946, along with the big wave of GIs who were resuming their education. The married GIs were allowed to return to Nashville on Wednesday nights. Clark says that unmarried students soon learned to avoid being in crews with the married ones on Wednesdays; the married ones slipped off right after lunch, leaving the others to do the work and take all the equipment back to camp.
W. F. Creighton III '53 tells that students sometimes straddled the legs of the tripod while trying to adjust their instruments. The student's inadvertently applied weight could, of course, damage the equipment. Whenever Dean Lewis saw a student do this, he would call out loudly: “Don't ride it—it isn't a horse.”
The only good surveying camp story we know from the 1950s concerns a student who passed by a camp building about ten o'clock one morning and saw Dean Lewis on the roof, inspecting the quality of some repairs that had been made. He quietly took the ladder down and laid it on the ground. The dean was stranded until noon when the crews returned from the field.