Very soon, Mell Hall will be gone. 

Room 200 Dorm XI — Mell Hall — was my first home at Auburn University. It was 1957, and I was enrolled as freshman. Later, when the University converted Mell Hall into an administrative building, I returned to Room 200 with my new master’s degree and served as counselor for Student Development Services. It was beginning of a career at Auburn University that lasted 45 years, until my retirement in 2002.

To the forty freshmen women living in Mell Hall that fall of 1957, it was exciting to realize that our dorm had once been a fraternity house. The boys had written their names and hometowns on the walls and rafters in the attic. Dorm XI girls took blankets, pillows and flashlights and had “sleep ins” in that old attic. We used to talk late into the night, imagining what the rafters of the hall, built in the 1920s,could tell us of its former occupants, their history and accomplishments over all these years. Mrs. Robinson, our dorm mother, didn’t know “her” girls were sleeping in that attic.

We were from Hanceville, Gadsden, Dothan, Anniston, Montgomery, Cullman, Mobile, and Birmingham – all finding our place in college life. We were girls who wore our raincoats over our P.E. shorts to walk across campus to the Quad dining hall because young Southern women could not be seen in shorts – or thus university policy dictated. Neither could we wear hair curlers in public.

Freshman curfew was 8:30 p. m., but if you made your grades you could stay out until 9:00 on weeknights and until l0:30 on weekends. Because I was the president of the dorm, the housemother had me document any girl’s late arrival. If those tardy minutes totaled ten or more, you were put on Friday night restriction and could not leave your dorm room. To get a drink from the hall cola machine you had to send your roommate with your quarter.

We became true orange-and-blue Auburn fans with the football national championship that fall and have remained dedicated for fifty years and celebrated with the Auburn Family as our Tigers won the National Championship in 2010.

Dorm XI girls graduated – most in the spring of 1961 — and became teachers, homemakers, brokers, business executives, college professors, accountants, administrators, and engineers. One became a tour guide for visitors in Washington, D. C. Today, those forty girls are mostly in their seventies. Some have been married now for 50 years. Most are proud grandmothers who sent their own children to Auburn. Now their grandchildren attend.

These women gave a marvelous legacy to the Auburn campus and community when they called Dorm XI

their home. We met once a week in dorm meetings and would sing our song in a rousing round:

“Dorm Eleven everybody knows

Rowdy girls and collegiate clothes.

How we love our Dorm Eleven

Everybody knows.“

Gail Haynes McCullers is the emeritus director of Housing and Residence Life. She graduated from Auburn in 1961, and received her master’s in 1966.