Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of the entrance to the Parrington Oval on the main campus of the University of Oklahoma (OU) in Norman. The description on the card gives away its age, because another oval was developed to the south after World War II.

I attended OU from 1984-1988, earning my undergraduate degree there, and I worked for most of those years at Scholars Programs on the top floor of the student union. I spent most of my time in buildings along the south or Van Vleet oval, with fewer reasons to be up north at the Parrington Oval.

The prominence of the flower bed in the postcard reminds me of the many beautiful ones that were meticulously maintained at OU. Below is a recent shot from the same vantage point as in the postcard, albeit with a different lens.

I notice that they added a statue to the north Parrington Oval in 1992. May We Have Peace was created by Allan Houser.

The postcard is a bit odd to me, since only two campus buildings are visible in the background: Evans Hall at the center, and Monnet Hall on the left side.

Evans is the administration building that was built in 1912 and embodies what Frank Lloyd Wright coined as the “Cherokee Gothic” look of the campus: red brick walls featuring a Gothic facade with light-colored stone. It was the university’s third try at an administration building after earlier ones burned in 1903 and 1907.

Arthur Grant Evans was the university’s second president, and he reorganized it into colleges and schools and merged its medical program with a school up north in Oklahoma City. English professor Vernon Parrington, namesake of the Parrington Oval, pushed to have the new building constructed in a collegiate Gothic design.

Monnet Hall was named for Julien Charles Monnet, the first dean of the OU College of Law from 1909 to 1941. He was fond of recounting how he arrived in Norman by train in 1909 and the temperature reached 114°F. He stayed at the Hotel Agnes, which lacked ventilation, leading him to call it the “Agony Hotel”. Despite that negative first impression, he eventually decided to accept the job.

His namesake building is a more traditional all-stone gothic affair, known to us engineering students as the “old Law Barn” with owls high up on each end which the engineers periodically repainted green. That tradition reflected a rivalry that began in the school’s early days, when some tipsy engineering students stole a cannon from a local park and shot it on St. Patrick’s Day. That shattered windows in Monnet Hall, upsetting the future lawyers. The rivalry between the engineering and law students lasted into the 1970s, but it was pretty quiescent by my time on campus in the 1980s. By then the law school had moved far to the south, but the owls stayed green.

A Bartlesville Connection

When the College of Law vacated Monnet Hall in the 1970s, the Western History Collection moved into the building, remaining there until May 2026, when it was consolidated with other special research collections on the fifth floor of the Bizzell Memorial Library.

The Western History Collection was established in 1927 as the Frank Phillips Collection, gaining its current name in a consolidation in 1967. Phillips originally intended to build a massive repository of Western history in the Bartlesville area, but that changed after extended negotiations with OU President William Bizzell and history professor Edward Everett Dale — as an undergraduate, I was often in the Bizzell library, and I had many classes, and I saw some of my favorite classic films, in Dale Hall.

Phillips provided an initial $10,000 to buy a massive amount of rare books, manuscripts, and vintage photographs in the 1920s and 1930s which form the foundation of the overall collection. His donation would be equivalent of a quarter-million 2026 dollars. Dale curated the Frank Phillips Collection for decades; the photograph shows him at one of the collection displays in the university library back in 1940.

Funly enough, although I visited almost every building on campus during my time as a student, including visiting every campus classroom as a member of the university’s Academic Programs Council, I barely stepped foot in either of those buildings. You can take virtual tours of the campus and not only look around the north oval but peek into many of the campus facilities.

Tomorrow’s postcard will take us to a building I’ve seen but never entered, down in Okmulgee.