Finding the pavilion is half the fun because its deeply shaded by the tree canopy and because the view from the sidewalk is obscured by boulders. 

Location - The Blue Dot

The Stone Pavilion overlooks North Eagleville Road at a point immediately west of the Storrs Congregational Church.  Its GSP coordinates are 48.8116 North, 72.2516 West.  As of January 1, 2025, the pavilion remains missing from Google Maps except for a photo link.

On UConn's most recent official map, show below, the pavilion is a tiny, blue, unlabeled, dot just above the word "Road."  Based on size and shape, it's UConn's smallest building and its only hexagon.  All other buildings have labels, including the small planetarium.

The Stone Pavilion is located on UConn's official map as a tiny blue hexagon, but it is neither named nor linked to any description. The previous official map from 2013 also shows the location but no label.

Street View

On Google Earth Street View, the pavilion is barely visible, even when the trees are bare of leaves.

Northeastern corner of UConn's main campus.  The pavilion is barely visible below the white steeple of Storrs Congregational Church and above the light-gray boulder crowding the sidewalk. Swan Lake and the Austin Building are to the right.

Access and Parking

Pedestrian access is via a stairway built of quarried stone that begins directly above a well-marked crosswalk at the eastern end of Swan Lake about 500 feet west of the stoplights at Highway 195.  Those with limited mobility can access the site from the rear via a paved parking lot behind the Church. The site is not accessible by wheelchair.  Correcting this is one of our highest priorities. The best guaranteed parking is in the North Garage.

The slate roof of the pavilion is barely visible from above as a small gray hexagon directly north of the black car on the road. Church steeple is visible to right. Swan Lake is to lower left. The large boulder referred to above is the one crowding the sidewalk.

Photo of the dedication ceremony taken on May 16, 1937. Shown left to right are Frank H. Peet of Kent, Master of the Connecticut Grange and Louis J. Taber of Columbus, Ohio, Master of the National Grange. Three others who were key to the project were likely there: Albert P. Marsh, the farmer from New Britain who donated the stones in 1934; Fritz Steinmeyer, the mason from Mansfield who reportedly supervised construction; and Connecticut State College President Albert Jorgensen.

Gift to the Future

UConn's  Stone Pavilion was built in 1937 with stones gifted to what was then Connecticut State College from the Connecticut State Grange. The total invoiced cost of its construction was $750.  Dedicated to "America's youth," this "Tribute to Agriculture" memorialized the historic, political, and economic ties between agriculture and education at the local, state, and national level. Without the support of the state chapter of the nation's most powerful agricultural organization, tiny Storrs Agricultural School could not have grown, in steps, into a state agricultural college, a U.S. land-grant institution, a state college, a national university.  UConn has since become an international university.

Dedication Ceremony

On Sunday, May 17, 1937, residents across the state opened their morning newspaper, the Hartford Courant, to read a front-page story about a festive dedication ceremony for the small hexagonal building. To read that story, link to these digital scans of Courant Front Page 1 and Courant Front Page 2 for May 17, 1937. The other stories and advertisements published that day provide a time capsule of contemporary culture for that moment.

It was a major "block" party!  Up to 3,000 students, politicians, residents, and grangers gathered for a picnic on UConn's lawns as part of the Ninth Annual Grange Sunday.  Background music was provided by a concert band and carillon concert from the church bells. Attendees witnessed college president Albert Jorgensen accept the pavilion as a gift from Master of the National Grange, Louis Taber, of Columbus, Ohio.  Pending future verification, construction had been supervised by Freidrich (Fritz) Steinmeyer, a Storrs resident, farmer, stonemason, and employee of what was then Connecticut State College.  Learn more by linking to Dedication Ceremony.

UConn's most Pivotal Year in its most Pivotal Decade

UConn's story as an institution began in 1880 with a gift of land by Charles and Augustus Storrs to found the Storrs Agricultural School. It opened the following year with 13 male students.  The fertile glacial soils of their farm had supported the Storrs family since 1698, when Samuel Storrs pioneered what had been Indigenous territory.  It's quite likely that at least one of the stones turned up by Storrs family farm activities ended up in the stones used to build the pavilion walls. Learn more about UConn's back-story.

Undated postcard dating from the time of the Stone Pavilion construction.  Its caption reads: "Whitney Hall and Church at Connecticut Agricultural College, Storrs, Conn." UConn Archive photo.

The gathering of the stones, their assembly into a building, and the celebration of this powerful symbol, spanned the most pivotal decade of UConn history.  In the early 1930s, a farmer named Albert P. Marsh of New Britain began gathering the specimen stones during national road trips.  In 1933, what had been Connecticut Agricultural College became Connecticut State College. In 1934, Marsh generously donated his collection of stones to the grange to construct a memorial. In early 1937 the Grange built and gifted the pavilion during what was arguably the most momentous year of UConn history.

In January that year, only four months before the ceremony Albert Jorgensen, president of what was then Connecticut State College, proposed a three-year,  three-million-dollar building program that, in cost, exceeded the sum total spent during the institution's history. In his vision, a dirt-road college would become paved road university with nearly five miles of roads and walkways.  Deals were being signed for new buildings and athletic facilities, including the campus's signature building Wilbur Cross Library, a new power plant with steam lines, and concrete sidewalks to replace muddy paths.  Without this vision, a bill introduced later that year into the state General Assembly might have created entirely separate university elsewhere in the state.  Quoting Bruce Stave's official history: "Representative Edward D. Seger of Colchester introduced a bill in the General Assembly to establish a university in the state of Connecticut....With an appropriation of five million dollars, it would have established an entirely new institution of land, buildings, and staff" somewhere else, and to be called Connecticut State University.  Though tabled in the 1937 session, the bill was reintroduced in 1939 with the location designated as Storrs, "passing both houses without dissent." The name "University of Connecticut" was adopted during the committee hearings.

The decision by the state to build its public flagship university in Storrs would not have happened without our institution's close connections to agriculture (now environment).  President Jorgensen.

When the pavilion exhibit was unveiled in 1937, Connecticut State College was a low-key state school that had just installed its first traffic light and held its first summer sessions. Today there are dozens of traffic lights, and many dozens of summer courses during three summer sessions. Back then, total college enrollment was 908 students, with twice as many men as women. By 2024, UConn would enroll 32,332  students, with more women than men, a 36-fold increase..

In both place and time, the public gifting of the Stone Pavilion from the Connecticut State Grange to what was then Connecticut State College on May 16, 1937, symbolizes the birth of the modern university powerfully than any other UConn building, monument, or structure.  President Jorgensen, a former Danish immigrant farmer from the Midwest, graciously accepted the gift from Louis J. Tabor, Master of the National Grange.   Within two years, on July 1, 1939, UConn became the institution it is today.

Painting of Wilbur Cross Library, with photo of Stone Pavilion to the same scale pasted to the arched window of the South Reading Room. The whole pavilion is roughly the size of its gold cupola. Both buildings were built as part of the same epoch of growth, the pavilion memorializing its agricultural heritage, and the Wilbur Cross Library the expansion into a university." UConn Archive painting credit to KNOWOL.

Moving on to Other Things

By the fall of 1937, the dedication party for the pavilion had become history.  September 1938 saw New England's most destructive hurricane drew public attention toward disaster recovery.  In 1939 the opening of the Wilbur Cross Library, and the broadened mission of the new university drew attention away from agriculture.  As the Great Depression ended, the agricultural sector of the New England Economy fell on hard times.  The proliferation of automobiles and rising personal incomes was shifting New England culture away from rural life toward urbanization, industrialization, tourism, and greater regional mobility.  As farms went bankrupt and reverted to forest, the strength and membership of the Grange declined precipitously.

By 2021, the pavilion was so infrequently visited that birds were nesting within easy reach. Removal of this empty nest was part of the initial cleanup for this project.

During this broad transition, the trees and brush surrounding the neglected pavilion grew rapidly, casting it into shadow.  The exterior stones became tarnished and lichen-covered to more closely resemble the adjacent rock slabs.   In 1997, staff writer Mark Roy called attention to the pavilion in a story for the UConn Advance, the print predecessor of online UConn Today.  When reprinted in 2012, Roy's story rekindled the attention of professor Robert Thorson, who had long been using the site for geology field trips.  To broaden awareness, in 2016 he published the location of the pavilion as part of an online "Interactive Geological Tour" that accompanied an article in UConn Magazine titled Rock On that featured UConn's historic stone walls and agricultural origins.

Shortly after 1937, trees began to shade out the pavilion. Today it's barely visible from the road on a bedrock ridge between the boulder on the left and the oak tree on the right.

When we initiated this project in 2021, paint was peeling from the pavilion's protective grate. We had to cut and rekey the lock. Birds were nesting at eye-level inside. The stones were begrimed with algae, soot, lichens, pollen, dust, and microbial films. Identifying and photographing the stones required that we scrub them with a wire brush soaked with detergent and water. For some stones, heavy algal coatings required bleach. Learn more by linking to Forgetting the Pavilion.

A Proper Name

When Mark Roy published his 1997 article, he wrote that the building "has been referred to over the years as 'the stone shelter,' 'the stone pavilion,' and – in recent years – 'the little stone house.'"  Our project carefully: examined all naming precedents from archival research. We did a word-by-word analysis of the original 1937 newspaper articles. We also scrutinized the names used in UConn's official 1988 nomination of the structure to the National Register of Historic Places as part of its historic district. That nomination used the terms "Outdoor Pavilion" and "Grange Shelter Pavilion." Following this precedent, we adopt the word "Pavilion" for this project because the final noun for National Register nomination is "pavilion," and we adopt the word "Stone" as the simplest, most consistently used, and most descriptive adjective for all previous mentions. Hereafter, we call it the Stone Pavilion  Though the word "Grange" would have  been known to every student in the 1930s, very few current students with urban, suburban, and international backgrounds know of that organization today, weakening its use as a modern adjective. Learn more about our name choice by linking to the National Register nomination and to our Document-by-Document Chronology.

Photo from UConn archive predating 1933 of students at Connecticut Agricultural College. Note that their bus was pulled by horses. It brought students up from the nearest train station at Eagleville, a village adjacent to the Willimantic River.

Back to the Future

Agriculture is experiencing a cultural resurgence as our food production system shifts away from intensive industrial techniques to more locally sourced, less polluting, and more sustainable methods. This shift, called regenerative agriculture, coincides with our urgent needs to: sequester more carbon in soils; help mitigate climate change; extend animal rights; and minimize farm pollution.  This transition has captured the attention and hopes of the rising generation of college students, the "Youth" to whom the pavilion was dedicated.  UConn's stone pavilion can symbolize and energize the future promise of regenerative agriculture.

Spring Valley Farm at UConn is training a new generation of farmers. Credit to Daily Campus, Feb 11, 2019 by Rachel Grella.

The story of the pavilion can also help UConn students and visitors feel more "grounded" to the earthly roots of our institution in human time, and to the earthly roots our our national landscapes in deep time.

Southerly view of UConn's entry sign on the right side of Highway 195 (Husky Way), located at the height of land before descending into campus with graceful Horsebarn Hill to the east.

Fun Destination

Almost every student knows where UConn's Dairy Bar is located and most have been there. Ditto for the bronze statue of Jonathan, the Husky mascot.  The stone Pavilion is located on a line between these two famous places for student life. It's conveniently located, always open, free of charge,  very user-friendly, and is a physical place  you can enter, feel, smell, touch, and catch the crystal vibe.  Why not go there, take a selfie, and share it with your friend on social media?

Piece of Home

Based on its 2024 Fact Sheet,  UConn students come from 46 of the 50 U.S. States. We believe that most, especially homesick first-year students, would appreciate knowing that a piece of their home is proudly exhibited in the Stone Pavilion.  To see it, all they need to do is visit the pavilion, locate the state name on the bronze index plaque, associate that state name with a state number (alphabetical except for Alaska and Hawaii), and then find the stone matching that number. Alternatively, you can use the map below of the exhibit wall to locate your state with its two-letter postal abbreviation.

To learn about your state's stone, just link to Piece of Home where you will find photographs, maps, links, and descriptions.

Use this map of the exhibit wall to locate your state stone. They are arranged alphabetically from top left to bottom right. Hawaii and Alaska were added later as a sixth row of 2 stones, one in each corner of the hexagon. Note the conspicuous gap in exact center is where a plaque was installed and later removed. Drill hole spacings in this gap match those of the states plaque. 

Fun Activities

The 50 specimen stones offers countless opportunities for creating games and puzzles and rhymes based on the state stones.  It's easy to imagine crossword puzzles, variations of bingo, scavenger hunts, and sorting games based on rock type or location.  If you create one, please let us know and we will likely post it on this site.

Imagine a crossword puzzle with clues based on stone specimens. For example, "state with oldest stone" or "state whose stone was shattered by earthquakes."

Catching the Stone Vibe

• FEELING HIGH?  Did you know that the source for the polished pink slab in the upper left of the photo (below) holds up the Mountain State's (Colorado) highest peak, named after the explorer Zebulon Pike?
• FEELING SPOOKED?  The gray stone in lower left comes from our nations's deepest granite quarry in Barre, Vermont.  It's likely that more U.S. gravestones are built from this rock than any other.
• FEELING RICH?  The dark rock to the right of center and with a turquoise-colored blotch is silver ore from an abandoned mine in Montana.
• FEELING OLD? The shiny wet rock right of center from Kansas is a hundred million times older than you are.
• FEELING STRESSED?  The stone from Connecticut in the upper right was literally crushed by tectonic pressure. We're relaxed compared to what it experienced.

Each of these pieces of UConn has a vibe that can be connected to a human emotion.

Strength in Diversity

America's strength lies in the diversity of its natural resources, landscapes, and people. This pavilion illustrates that our campus, state, and country are beautiful aggregates of very different things.

The Stone Pavilion is an open-air museum exhibit built of stones above bedrock ridge surrounded by colossal glacial boulders.  

Documenting the Collection

Within the interior of the pavilion, high up in the upper left corner is a bronze plaque identifying which state each numbered specimen stone comes from. Beyond this simple association --for example, Alabama 1, Arizona 2, Hawaii 50, etc.-- we know of no other information about the stones except for the anecdotal comments from a 1937 newspaper article that: can't be traced to any source document; was written by an anonymous reporter; and contains multiple errors. To fill this void of information, in 2020 we created the Stone Pavilion Project in 2020 to document each stone and provide as much detail as we could find

For each state specimen stone, we offer four illustrations: a photo of the stone; a closeup of one portion of the stone; an outline map showing the stone's state location; and a thumbnail geological map of state.  Associated with these images are descriptions, identifications, interpretations, and links to further resources.  The state geological maps for each state are from the U.S. Geological Survey’s collection of Geological Maps from its Mineral Resources Online Spatial Data, an interactive website that allows you to seamlessly explore state, regional, and national geology. Click the menu in the upper left and begin.  Link here to learn more about the group of  Specimen Stones as a collection.

Our research methods for documenting and interpreting the specimens are described at the link Documentation and Quality Control .  The related link Explanation of State Stones describes how we organize and present this information to the viewer.  Given many uncertainties, our interpretations must be considered preliminary until further information becomes available.  Everything is a work in progress.  If you notice an error, are able to identify a likely geological formation, or have something to add, please contact Robert Thorson at your convenience. As with all museum collections, this is a collaborative effort through time and space. Already it involves the staff of most of the state geological surveys.

Exhibit with Five Galleries

Having preliminary, science-based labels, descriptions, and classifications allows the Stone Pavilion to be used as a natural history exhibit organized across five different themes or galleries. The Connecticut State Museum of Natural History is now engaged in the process of designing future exhibits, both at the site and online.

Outlines of all 50 state specimen stones superimposed over a photograph taken from the front archway. The Northwest, North, and Northeast segments of the exhibit wall and their junctions with the stone floor and the concrete ceiling are outlined in blue. The bronze plaque in upper left associates the name of a state and an integer on a bronze pin drilled into that state's stone. The empty square in the center and empty drill holes indicate that a comparable sized plaque was removed. 

State-By-State

This gallery allows you to click through the state stones in whatever order you prefer.  You may with to look at the stone from your state of birth, other states you care about, or states you're curious about.  If you're in the pavilion, you can use your cell phone to read about any of the stones.  To tour the nation, use the menu above.

One Earth

This gallery integrates the three collections at the site: the local bedrock and its glacially transported slabs; the state collection dominated by fieldstones hauled in from every town, and the national collection of specimen stones.   To learn more, link to One Earth.

Ancient Worlds

This gallery shows you how the 50 specimen stones provide examples of: (1) Fossils and Mass Extinctions; (2) Ancient Climates and Environments;  (3) Active vulcanism, (4) Mountain Building and Uplift; and (5) Iconic Landscapes. To learn more, link to Ancient Worlds.

Time Machine

This gallery narrates the story of the U.S. landscape by arranging the specimen stones in chronological order. The oldest stone is a fragment of the Canadian Shield torn from Archaean rocks about 2.7 billion years old and dragged southward into North Dakota.  The youngest is a bubbly lava flow from New Mexico that's probably only about 5,000 years old.  To learn more, link to Time Machine.

Natural Resources

This gallery explains how the stones provide us with mineral, energy, and aesthetic resources. The architectural stones used to create the building constitute a resource that was used elsewhere for fieldstone walls, crushed for roads, or concentrated for other purposes.   The specimen stones represent metal ores, nationally significant aquifers, and quarries for objects ranging from carved gravestones to building dimension stone.  To learn more, link to Natural Resources.

Stonehenge, on the Salisbury Plain in the UK, offers a well- known  example of geoheritage.  Through geological investigations, we've learned that its stones were quarried in Wales where they were originally erected before being disassembled and re-assembled in England.  Credit: Creative Commons.

Definition

The phrase "cultural heritage" is widely understood, referring to the places, people, stories, and materials of the past that help us understand who we are.   "Geoheritage" is the subset of cultural heritage referring to the earthly materials and landscapes that help us understand who we are.  Two examples include: Siccar Point on the Scottish coast where the discovery of deep time by James Hutton in the 1780s helped usher in the European Enlightenment; and a thin stratum at Gubbio, Italy where the cosmic cause of dinosaur mass extinction was revealed in the 1980s.  These, along with Arizona's Grand Canyon, constitute three of the world's 100 Geoheritage Sites recently compiled by the  International Union of Geological Sciences.

More locally, the 1937 construction of the Stone Pavilion with local, state and national stones symbolized the dream come true for an agricultural school to become a state college and then truly national university whose tap root is agrarian-environmental.

The Grand Canyon in Arizona is an internationally recognized geoheritage site. The main draw for tourism is the physical rock landscape and the processes by which it was shaped.  The same is true at a vastly smaller scale for the bedrock ridge and glacial boulders at the stone pavilion. Credit: Photo of Mather Point by John Burcham, New York Times.

The Geological Society of America defines Geoheritage, as a "generic but descriptive term applied to sites or areas of geological features with significant scientific, educational, cultural, and/or aesthetic value." The Stone Pavilion qualifies. One professor Thorson's recent students of Peruvian descent dubbed it a mini-Machu Picchu. Both are stone structures perched on bedrock ridges that are accessed by quarried walkways.  Link to the society's Position Paper #20.

Stone from exterior of pavilion collected from some Connecticut town. Note the diversity in shape and composition of the surrounding stones.

Geodiversity

The term biodiversity is widely understood.  Its landscape counterpart is geodiversity, which gives rise to biodiversity, which makes human diversity possible.  One good example of geodiversity is your cell phone or the electronic communication device you're using to visit this website.  Within that device are dozens of minerals that were mined and processed to make modern life possible.  Within the Stone Pavilion are examples of material resources that were used to build the modern world, from quarried dimension stone to ore minerals. .

Old Newgate Prison and Copper Mine is a good example of a state geoheritage site, though it's not currently recognized as such.  UConn's Stone Pavilion is another.  Photo credit to the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development.

State and National Registers

We are already exploring nomination of the Stone Pavilion to state and national registers of significant places.

To learn more about the geoheritage of the pavilion, link to Geoheritage.