Oakland

Cathedral of Learning

Nationality rooms in the Cathedral of Learning

Work on the Cathedral of Learning began in 1926, and classes started there in the early 1930s. Two rooms inside it have stories of their own.

The Early American Room is on the third floor. George Hubbard Clapp commissioned it in 1938, and it was built as a seventeenth-century New England room, with a loft bedroom reached through a closet. E. Maxine Bruhns, who directed the Nationality Rooms for years, put her grandmother’s wedding quilt on the bed. She said she smoothed it, turned away, and found it turned down, with a dent in the pillow. A custodian, John Carter, called her more than once about the quilt, and about ears of corn that had come off a peg by the fireplace. In 2005 the Pitt Chronicle wrote about a television crew in the room the night before Halloween 1996, and about a cradle that visitors said rocked by itself. In 2025 Michael Walter, who runs education programs for the rooms, told The Pitt News that Bruhns had wanted the room promoted as haunted, and that the tours stopped telling the story because people were booking them only to hear it.

The Croghan-Schenley Ballroom, on the first floor, is older than the tower around it. William Croghan Jr. built it in the 1830s, in a house for his daughter Mary, later Mary Schenley. The room was taken apart and rebuilt inside the Cathedral. One fireplace opens into a small chamber behind it. The story told in that room is Mary’s. A chandelier moves. In the morning the furniture has been rearranged.

Sources

Oakland