The Old Main, also known as the Livingston C. Lord Administration Building, is the oldest building at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. Construction on the building began in 1896 and was completed in 1899. Architect George H. Miller designed the building, which has a medieval style resembling a castle. The building features a central tower, multiple turrets, and a crenellated roof line. It is one of five medieval buildings built at Illinois' public universities under Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld's administrations; the buildings are collectively known as Altgeld's castles. The Old Main originally housed all of the offices and classrooms for Eastern Illinois, its library, auditorium, and gymnasium. It was the only building on campus until 1909, when Pemberton Hall opened. The building is now used mainly as an administrative building, though it still contains some classrooms.

The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 16, 1981.

https://en.wikipedia.org/

Castles have been a regular feature of midwestern college campuses since at least 1857 when Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, erected its main building with towers and battlements. Other medieval forms-- more church-like than castle-like-- appeared as early as 1827 at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and in 1839 at Jubilee College on the Illinois frontier near Peoria.1 The castle that arose on Eastern Illinois State Normal School’s campus one century ago clothed then-modern values in what to us appears to be traditional garb, but was to contemporaries quite current. To its builders and occupants the school’s medieval form represented democratic ideals and sound morals, a fitting edifice for the education of future teachers. Broad cultural currents came together in the collegiate castles of the nineteenth century, including the association of the Gothic with christian morality, the aesthetic appeal of the picturesque, and the political triumph of democracy. We can see all of these elements at work in Eastern’s Old Main.

Battlements, towers, turrets, pointed arches, and label molds all are characteristic of the various Gothic revival styles. Unlike the original Gothic, where arches actually supported walls and battlements provided protection from marauders, these elements in their revived form were purely decorative. But the Gothic style remained a venerable tradition at institutions of higher learning. Having arisen out of certain social and economic conditions of the middle ages, it was only natural that the original university buildings assume the building characteristics of their time. Although many American colleges in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries turned their backs on this tradition, preferring to build in the more modern classical style, by the 1830s the Gothic again assumed a pre-eminent place on United States college campuses. Popularized by Alexander Jackson Davis, the “Collegiate Gothic” also represented a break from the rigid classical education that held sway at the oldest institutions.

https://www.eiu.edu/

Free

Castle Park

- The Castle is used by a university

- No visiting