A clock face of Fountain Hall, a historic building on Morris Brown College’s campus, was vandalized recently, school officials confirmed Monday.
The damage to the building on the campus of the historically Black college involved the removal of one of the four-sided clock’s faces and happened sometime during the past couple of weeks, a spokeswoman said.
Fountain Hall, built in 1882, became a National Historic Landmark in 1975. The building once housed the office of author and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, a chapel art studio and gallery. Since it fell into disuse in 2003, the building has undergone weather damage and been repeatedly vandalized. It was listed as one of the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation’s Places in Peril in 2010 and 2020.
As a result of the most recent vandalism, the college’s administration reached out to local officers to increase police presence in the overnight hours, and is working with city officials to place cameras in the area, said a spokesperson for the college.
Last year, Morris Brown College — which is working to regain its accreditation — received $75,000 from the National Trust for Historic Preservation to form a team to develop a restoration plan for Fountain Hall. A study from the National Park Service estimated a cost of $1.4 million to make the building structurally safe enough for preservation work to begin; last year, Morris Brown College was awarded a $500,000 grant from a National Park Service initiative to go toward Fountain Hall’s renovation. Fountain Hall committee co-chair Julian Smith told the AJC in May that the estimated restoration cost would be around $30 million. A fundraising campaign for Fountain Hall’s restoration has garnered about $3,100 on a website dedicated to the effort and to preserving the building’s history.
The newest damage to Fountain Hall is unlikely to halt the current use of grant funding, the spokesperson said.
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