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“Roger,” astronaut Jim Lovell radioed to mission control in Houston on Christmas morning 1968, “please be informed there is a Santa Claus.” Lovell’s revelation confirmed Apollo 8’s departure from lunar orbit. The night before on Christmas Eve, he, Frank Borman, and Bill Anders – the first humans to orbit the moon – enthralled a global primetime television audience with extraordinary celestial footage, before sending us off to bed by taking turns narrating the Bible’s depiction of creation.

In early 1873, the state created a third district normal school for southeast Missouri, joining district one in Kirksville and district two in Warrensburg.

Professor Harry Albert, a dedicated faculty member, wept openly at the sight of what remained of Old Normal’s ornamental towers after an overnight fire destroyed the school’s lone building and all its contents on April 8, 1902.

Robert Burett Oliver, one of the region’s foremost attorneys – and whose wife Marie designed the state flag – was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives in November 1902 for one purpose: obtain $250,000 for Academic Hall.

From 1887 to 1925, Houck served 38 years on the university’s Board of Regents; 36 of those as president – an unmatched record of service.

At the time of the Old Normal fire in 1902, work was underway on a second campus building, a new Science Hall just a few hundred feet to the east of Academic to accommodate the recently created Department of Chemistry and Agriculture. By that summer – with insurance money from the fire – construction commenced on a third campus structure, the Training School.

Built between 1903 and 1906, Academic Hall is – by Legg’s neo-classical design – architecturally in harmony with Science Hall and Training Hall, all under construction at once.

Southeast Missouri Normal School did not initially offer on-campus housing. Since the state refused to fund residence halls, Louis Houck, M.E. Leming, and Leon J. Albert – a regent, lumberman, and banker respectively – formed the Normal Dormitory Association in 1904 to privately build and operate student accommodations.

In 1919, state legislators officially recognized the important evolution of our institution’s educational mission; marking the milestone with a somewhat subtle, yet significant, name change: from Southeast Missouri Normal School to Southeast Missouri State Teachers College.

Louis Houck bought a collection of ancient, medieval, and modern works of art reproduced by German artist August Gerber, donating them to the school with the wish that a room be made available in Academic Hall so that the statuary would be permanently displayed.