Eastern Indiana State Normal School
Administration Building, Ball State University
| Dates: | 1898-1899 |
| Location: | Northwest corner University and McKinley Avenues, Muncie, Delaware County, Indiana |
| Architects: | J. F. Alexander & Son, of Lafayette, Indiana |
| Contractor: | Marion Hathaway, of Red Key, Indiana |
| Cost: | $32,949 |
The Eastern Indiana State Normal School (a teacher's college) opened in 1899. The college building was designed by the noted Lafayette architectural firm of J. F. Alexander & Son and was built 1898-1899. It was designed at roughly the same time as the City Building in Elwood, about 30 miles away. These are the only known projects by J. F. Alexander & Son in the east-central part of Indiana. Both feature yellow brick and Neoclassical detailing typical of the firm's work during this period.
Eastern Indiana State Normal School went bankrupt and closed in 1901, reopened as Palmer University (1902-1904), closed again and reopened as the Indiana Normal School and College of Applied Science (1905-1907), then went bankrupt and closed again. After sitting vacant for several years, the school reopened as the Muncie Normal Institute in 1912. The school transferred ownership and went bankrupt early in 1917.
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| Illustration of a sketch from the architect's perspective (now lost) printed in the Muncie Daily Herald, June 11, 1898. | Front page article from the dedication of the Eastern Indiana State Normal School, Muncie Daily Herald, August 29,1899. |
Late in 1917, the Ball family, owners of the Ball Bros. Co. (makers of the famous Ball canning jars), purchased the school property at public auction for $35,000 (about 2/3 of its appraised value). The Ball family found that as the new property owners they inherited the litigation against the school. The solution was to donate the property to the State of Indiana to establish a branch of the Indiana State Normal School (now Indiana State University), which would also free the Ball family from legal responsibility to the creditors of the school.
Ball State Teachers College opened in 1918 in the old Eastern Indiana State Normal School building. The campus expanded through the 1920s-1930s, and again during the 1960s-1980s. Ball State became a university in 1965.
The building has been known as the Administration Building since the 1920s, and was remodeled several times. It experienced several phases of abandonment, neglect, and repair as the different schools opened and closed between 1901-1918. The original auditorium on the rear of the second and third floors was divided up into classrooms and offices in the 1920s. The exterior remains largely intact except for the balustrade around the roof and the porte cochere on the east end of the building (removed in the 1950s). Very little of the interior is intact. The present staircases follow the same form as the originals and the main rotunda was remodeled to some resemblance of its original form in the mid-1990s.
[Some information derived from Ball State University, An Interpretive History, by A. O. Edmonds & E. B. Geelhoed. Indiana University Press, 2001.]
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| Indiana Normal School, 1907. | Muncie Normal Institute, 1913. |
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| Muncie Normal Institute, 1914. | Administration Building, Ball State University, 2004. |
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| Front elevation, 2004 | Rear of building, center wing originally housed auditorium on 2nd and 3rd floors |
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| Detail of front facade | Detail of pilaster capital and cornice on west facade |
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| Detail of front facade | View from the southeast |