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It’s April 28, 1912, and a crowd gathers inside Dumbach Hall, home of the new Loyola Academy. The cold, wet weather has driven everyone inside, where the Archbishop of Chicago James Quigley has just finished speaking. The next person to approach the podium is Joseph Cudahy, and in his address he presents Loyola University with their first building, which he’s named in honor of his late father, Michael Cudahy.
When it opened four months later, the new Michael Cudahy Science Hall housed not only Loyola’s first physics and chemistry labs and classrooms but also an astronomical observatory.
While Dumbach Hall is rightly credited as the oldest building on the Lake Shore Campus, Cudahy Science Hall was really the first built by the University. Dumbach was constructed by Loyola’s predecessor, St. Ignatius College, and from its construction in 1908 to 1959 Dumbach housed the Loyola Academy, a college-prep high school now located in Wilmette.
Shortly before his death in 1910 after an operation on his appendix, Cudahy promised to fund a classroom building for the brand new Loyola University. After his death, his sons Joseph and Edward made good on that promise, contributing about $200,000, or over $6.5 million today, to fund construction.
Stephen Schloesser is the founding director of the Jesuit Heritage Research Center and history professor at Loyola, said he found it interesting the initial building at a Jesuit university was the science building. He said the building was totally donated by Cudahy, an Irish Catholic immigrant.
“My guess is that he would have been talking to Father Dumbach,” Schloesser said. “He bought the land and he would have said, ‘What do you need to expand the college into a full-blown university with professional schools and all that?’ And I think Fr. Dumbach would have said, ‘Science, you know, we just need science, that’s the big deal.’”
Beyond classrooms and labs, the building also originally housed seismographic and meteorological observatories. The seismograph in Cudahy’s basement was active from 1913 to 1960, and the Jesuit Seismological Association was founded at Loyola in 1925 by a group of Jesuit geophysicists.
But why, in addition to these science facilities, was an observatory included in the original construction?
