Southeast Missouri Normal School did not initially offer on-campus housing. Students had to live far away from Normal Hill in Cape, which left the administration with little oversight as to whether accommodations in the town’s co-ed boarding houses were doing their part to protect the virtue of the school’s historically female student body. On-campus dormitories were the obvious solution.
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.
The men purchased land across the street from Academic Hall on the south side of Normal Avenue where the University Center is today. With J.B. Legg already at work on campus, and again in the interest of symmetry, the architect designed Albert Hall for male students and Leming Hall for females.
Following the same design - although Leming was slightly larger to accommodate more women – the three-story limestone dormitories were equipped with electricity and steam heat, and contained their own kitchen, pantry, dining hall, laundry room, and gymnasium in the basement. The top two levels were divided between parlors and reception rooms, bath and toilet rooms, and forty-four student rooms.
Coinciding with Academic Hall’s re-opening, Albert Hall welcomed its first residents in 1905 and Leming Hall the next year; the only dormitories on the campus of a Missouri normal school at the time.
To maintain proper Victorian gender separation, Southeast students hereafter had to live in either the dorms or else some other faculty approved arrangement.
