The Windows Were Blocked Up for Decades. A $54 Million Renovation Just Opened Them Again.
There is a building at the heart of the MTSU campus that has watched every version of this university happen. It was here before the football program mattered, before the aerospace fleet, before Murfreesboro became one of the fastest-growing cities in Tennessee. Last week, after more than two years behind construction fence, it opened its doors again.
The first building on campus
Kirksey Old Main opened in 1911 as the Administration Building — the first structure raised on what was then a brand-new normal school training Tennessee's teachers. Generations simply called it “Old Main,” and for decades it was effectively the entire university under one roof: offices, classrooms, an auditorium, a gymnasium, the bookstore, even the post office.
In 1978 it was renamed for Howard G. Kirksey, a longtime administrator whose name it has carried ever since. His son, Howard Graden Kirksey Jr., was among those on hand for the reopening.
The building did not reach 2026 unaltered. It was worked over repeatedly during the 1960s, the era's remodeling instincts being what they were, and somewhere along the way the original auditorium's windows were blocked up — daylight traded for wall.
What $54 million bought
The project, which broke ground in spring 2024, covered Kirksey Old Main and neighboring Rutledge Hall at a combined cost of roughly $54 million, touching about 88,370 gross square feet.
The restoration work is the part worth walking over to see. Those blocked-up auditorium windows have been reopened. The building's original steel trusses, long buried behind finishes, are now exposed on purpose. Hardwood floors and wooden wainscoting were restored rather than replaced. A new north-facing lobby with floor-to-ceiling glass gives the building something it never had in 1911 — a genuinely accessible front door.
Behind the walls, everything else is new: HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and the data and IT backbone a modern computing department actually requires. The reconfigured interior now holds 14 classrooms, 94 offices, five computer labs, three tutoring labs and four student lounges.
One casualty of the work: the E.W. Midgett Building, attached to Old Main for some 65 years, was razed — which is part of how the new lobby found room to exist.
A math and computer science building now
Here is the pleasing symmetry. The oldest building on campus is now the home of its most forward-looking departments: computer science, mathematical sciences and data science, all within the College of Basic and Applied Sciences. Rutledge Hall, meanwhile, converts from a residence hall into an academic building housing the University Studies Department.
More than 200 people turned out for the reopening on Tuesday, Aug. 18, timed so students would walk into a finished building for the fall semester. University President Sidney A. McPhee, Provost Mark Byrnes and Dean Greg Van Patten spoke, along with the chairs of the computer science and mathematical sciences departments and a computer science graduate student.
Why it lands differently here
Murfreesboro tears down and rebuilds at a pace that can be dizzying. Whole corridors of this city look nothing like they did ten years ago, and not every trade has been a good one. So there is something worth noticing in a project that spent $54 million to keep a 115-year-old building standing, took the trouble to find the windows somebody had sealed over, and then handed the place to the students least likely to think of themselves as caretakers of history.
Old Main was always where the university did its business. It still is.
Also on campus this month: MTSU's Free Cycle furnishes dorm rooms for nothing — and it is running short.
