North Hall

By editor

Missoula, Missoula County, Montana, April 2026

In 1917, two architects sat down in Helena and New York, respectively, and drew up a plan for what the University of Montana ought to look like. George Carsley was a Helena man who knew the state and its ambitions. Cass Gilbert was a New York man who had designed the Woolworth Building and the United States Supreme Court and was not accustomed to thinking small. Together they produced a campus master plan of considerable grandeur: two U-shaped clusters of dormitories, one for men and one for women, arranged with the geometric confidence of men who believed that the future would cooperate with their drawings.

The future, as it turned out, had other plans. Of the two full U-shapes that Carsley and Gilbert envisioned, only three buildings were ever completed. North Hall was one of them.

The University of Montana had been founded in 1893 and held its first classes in 1895, in a building that was, by all accounts, more aspirational than impressive. The institution grew steadily in the years that followed, but its physical plant remained a collection of buildings that had been erected as needed rather than planned as a whole. The 1917 Carsley-Gilbert plan was the first serious attempt to give the campus a coherent architectural identity, and it arrived at a moment when the university was ready to think about what it wanted to become.

The plan called for the dormitories to be built in the Renaissance Revival style, which is the architectural vocabulary of civic ambition: red-brown brick, cream-colored terra cotta ornamentation, symmetrical facades, and a general air of permanence. The style had been used for courthouses, banks, and state capitols across the country, and it carried with it an implicit argument that the institution housed within deserved to be taken seriously. For a state university in a western city that had been a railroad town twenty years earlier, that argument was worth making.

The firm chosen to design the dormitories was Link and Haire of Helena, which was, by 1922, the most prolific architectural practice in Montana. J.G. Link had been born in Bavaria in 1870 and arrived in Montana by way of a career that had taken him through several western states. C.S. Haire joined him in 1906 to form the partnership. Together they designed courthouses, schools, commercial buildings, and churches across the state, leaving a built record that can still be read in the streetscapes of a dozen Montana towns. The Crowley Block in Lewistown, the Glacier County Courthouse in Cut Bank, the Missoula County Courthouse: all of them bear the Link and Haire signature, which is to say they are solid, well-proportioned, and built to last.

North Hall went up in 1922, following the Carsley-Gilbert plan with the fidelity that the architects had specified. The building was intended to house women students, and it was designed with the assumption that its counterpart, Elrod Hall, would rise beside it to complete the southern arm of the women's U. Elrod Hall was built in 1923. Corbin Hall followed. And then, in the 1930s, the Depression arrived and the plan was abandoned, leaving the two U-shapes permanently incomplete, like sentences that were interrupted before they reached their period.

The building that resulted from this truncated ambition is, by any reasonable measure, a handsome one. The red-brown brick facade catches the afternoon light in a way that makes the cream-colored terra cotta ornamentation stand out against it. The proportions are right. The windows are generous. The building has the quality that the best institutional architecture achieves: it looks as though it has always been there, and it is difficult to imagine the campus without it.

For sixty-five years, North Hall served as a women's residence. The students who lived there occupied rooms that Link and Haire had designed with the expectation that they would be occupied by young women pursuing education at a state university in the Rocky Mountain West, which was, in 1922, a somewhat unusual ambition. The University of Montana had been admitting women since its founding, but the dormitory system that would make women's residential life a normal part of campus culture was still being built. North Hall was part of that construction, in both the literal and the figurative sense.

In 1955, the building was renamed Brantly Hall, in honor of Theodore Brantly, who had served as Chief Justice of the Montana Supreme Court and as a member of the university's Board of Regents. The name change was the kind of institutional gesture that universities make when they want to honor a benefactor or a distinguished figure, and it was accomplished without any alteration to the building itself. The brick was still the same brick. The terra cotta was still the same terra cotta. The building that Link and Haire had designed in 1922 was still standing in 1955, which was not a surprise to anyone who had seen their work.

The building functioned as a women's residence until 1987, sixty-five years after it was completed. What it has been used for since then is a matter of university administration, which is a subject that does not lend itself to the kind of narrative that a building's exterior invites. The building is still there. The brick has darkened slightly with age. The terra cotta is still cream-colored. The Carsley-Gilbert plan is still incomplete, and the two U-shapes that were meant to frame the southern end of the campus exist only in the original drawings, which are held in the university's archives.

Cass Gilbert, who designed the Woolworth Building and the Supreme Court and a great many other things, died in 1934, before the plan he had drawn up with George Carsley was fully abandoned. He did not live to see the Depression make his U-shapes impractical. George Carsley outlived him, and presumably watched the plan contract year by year until it was clear that the two U-shapes would remain forever at three buildings each. Whether he considered this a failure or simply a fact of life in a state where ambition and resources rarely matched is not recorded.

What is recorded is the building itself, which stands on Campus Drive in Missoula and looks exactly like what it was designed to look like: a women's dormitory at a western state university, built in 1922 by Helena architects who knew their trade, following a plan drawn up by a Helena man and a New York man who believed that the future would cooperate with their drawings.

See also

• North Hall at Missoula, Missoula County (Montana National Register Sign Program, erected 2020)
• University of Montana Historic District -- Missoula campus, Missoula County