New Campus and Early Growth
Three classroom buildings were built for the new campus – Bel Air, then called the Academic Building; Aberdeen, then called the Science Building; and Maryland Hall, the campus’s first library.
Below is the layout when the new campus opened in 1964, and a plan for future growth.
With the opening of the new campus – and the arrival of baby boomers at college – enrollment jumped from under 500 to more than 1500 in just a few years.
Administrators (President Hankin on the left) made plans for immediate expansion.
By the end of the 1960s, the campus had a fine arts building (Havre de Grace), a student center, and a gymnasium (replacing the gymnasium in one of the old barns).
Chesapeake Center, added in the late 1960s, was the first student center. It included a student lounge, a cafeteria, the bookstore, and a theatre.
A final new building was for vocational-technical training (now Joppa Hall), and was to be shared with local high school students. It represented a significant expansion of the career-education opportunities at the college.
The local newspaper called it a “fabulously expensive, spanking new” building, holding “half a million dollars’ worth of computers, hairdryers, and metal-working machinery” (Aegis, April 20 , 1967).
Nursing – another career education program – was added in the late 1960s as well.