The original testing center

Today I was working on linking photographs from the BYU 100th anniversary photography collection to their archive finding aids. Which basically means that in the archives we create this database of files you can search through when you're looking for something in the archives and it will tell you what the collection is about and where you can find it. So today I was finding the digital copies of the photographs and adding them so they'd be easier to find, and I came across this...

It's the original Testing Center!

This was taken circa 1890 in the old Brigham Young Academy building. (Now the Academy building is the Provo City Library and one of my most favorite places in all of Provo. It is seriously one of the coolest libraries ever, on the inside and the outside.)

The room the students are sitting in was called "Room D" and it could be changed around for different purposes, but it was often used as a study room, as shown in the photo.

When I saw this picture, the first thing it made me think of was the Testing Center-that wonderful building full of dreadful tests, runny noses, and broken dreams. Apparently, the idea for the Testing Center has been around for a while. And if you look closely at the picture you can see the despair in the student's faces, proving that students and the Testing Center have had a rocky relationship since 1890!

Now this isn't the actual Testing Center, since the Heber J. Grant Building, home of the Testing Center today, wasn't built until 1925. Did you know that originally the Heber J. Grant Building was the library? Isn't it funny that this picture, that looks like the Testing Center, was taken in the current Provo City Library and that the current Testing Center use to be the library? Talk about coincidences.

I also found this photograph of the staircase south of campus from when it was first constructed in 1924.

The hill looks so small, I swear it's bigger in real life! Tomorrow I'm going to count the stairs and compare it to the picture to make sure they haven't been adding a stair a year or something sneaky and devious like that.

This is one thing that I love about history. Finding historic evidence of things that still exist and seeing what it looked like at different points in history. Like take this example of Provo Center Street...

circa 1860

circa 1890

1900

Today...obviously

Isn't that just so cool?! I love how downtown Provo still has historic charm. Its obvious that its not all the same buildings, though I think further down the street some of them might be the original buildings, but it has the same feeling of a historic town center that it did in 1860. And it looks pretty darn awesome in the snow.