They Bricked Up the Windows a Century Ago. This Week MTSU Opened Them Again.

Every campus has a first building. Middle Tennessee State University's has been standing at the head of the quad since 1911, when a new state normal school opened east of downtown Murfreesboro with 125 students and a hundred acres of Rutherford County farmland. On Tuesday, after more than two years behind construction fence, the university took the wrapping off it.

Kirksey Old Main reopened Aug. 18, the centerpiece of a $54.3 million project that also rebuilt Rutledge Hall — two of the five buildings the campus began with. University leaders have called it the most ambitious preservation effort in the school's history, and standing in the finished auditorium, that is not hard to believe.

It Was Not Always Called Kirksey

When the doors opened, the building was simply the Administration Building. It housed nearly everything a young teachers' college needed at once: the president's office, the classrooms, the library, the assembly hall. Students did what students on normal-school campuses across the country did with a building like it — they called it Old Main, and the nickname stuck for six decades before the university made it semi-official. In 1978 the school attached the name of Howard G. Kirksey, an administrator through the 1960s, and the building became Kirksey Old Main. Around campus, it is mostly just KOM.

The school changed names four times around it. Middle Tennessee State Normal School became a teachers college, then a state college, then in 1965 a university. The building stayed put, neoclassical and symmetrical, columns across the front, the kind of grand entrance that ends up on a hundred thousand graduation photographs.

What the Renovation Actually Did

The work, which began in the spring of 2024, covered roughly 88,370 gross square feet and went well past a coat of paint. Decades of additions and partitions had buried much of what made the building worth saving, and the project's guiding idea was to take those layers back off.

The windows of the original auditorium — bricked and blocked up somewhere along the way — were reopened. The original steel trusses, long hidden above a ceiling, are exposed again. Hardwood floors and wooden wainscoting were restored, and the original brick and carved stone detail was brought back out. Behind all of that, the building got an entirely new century: modern heating and cooling, plumbing, electrical, and the data infrastructure a computer science department cannot function without.

The most visible change is on the north side. The Midgett Building, a later addition that once held the College of Business, was demolished to make room for a new lobby with floor-to-ceiling glass and, for the first time, a genuinely accessible entrance. Inside, the finished building holds 14 classrooms, 94 offices, five computer labs, three tutoring labs and four student lounges.

The Oldest Building, the Newest Subjects

There is a nice symmetry in who ended up inside. Kirksey Old Main is home to mathematics, computer science and data science — programs in the College of Basic and Applied Sciences that did not exist in any form when the cornerstone was laid. The building that once trained Tennessee's schoolteachers now houses the departments teaching machine learning and statistical modeling under its 1911 trusses.

Rutledge Hall, meanwhile, made a bigger leap: from dormitory to academic building. It now holds the University Studies Department, which moved over from KOM and is under one roof for the first time, along with an expanded lobby and new interior stairs. Anecdote Architectural Experiences designed the two-building project and Messer Construction Co. built it, working with the university's campus planning department.

The timing is deliberate. Thousands of new students arrive for convocation on Aug. 22, and the first class of the fall will walk into a building that looks, in the ways that matter, a great deal like the one the first class walked into.

Related: MTSU announced the $54 million Kirksey and Rutledge renovation in 2024 — and more recently, MTSU students took the classroom to China.