C-Hill nearing its 100th year

That’s how the May 25, 1926, issue of Chadron Normal School’s student newspaper, The Eagle, described the appearance of the giant “C” on the hill overlooking the school as it was illuminated by lanterns during a night-time ceremony that was, the paper proclaimed, “witnessed by thousands.”

Only two years before, the graduating classes of 1923 and 1924 at the Normal School, now Chadron State College, had pooled resources and commissioned construction of the huge concrete monument as a gift to the school.

The practice of creating hillside letters like Chadron’s originated in California and Utah in the early 1900s as a way of ending sometimes violent rivalries between different university graduating classes. By the 1920s, construction of the massive markers was underway in towns and cities across the American West, where they served as symbols of school pride and community identity. As many as 500 such markers may now grace hills and mountains in America, but Chadron’s “C” seems to be the only one of note in Nebraska.

Using a design by Frank Phillips, a former Chadron Normal student who was studying engineering at the University of Nebraska, college math professor T. A. F. Williams had “the young men of his trigonometry class” mark out the letter on “Academy Hill” in the early summer of 1924, the Chadron Journal reported in a front page story on June 27.

According to an account discovered by longtime CSC information officer Con Marshall, Williams was not confident of his students’ measurements, so prior to construction he and his wife strung muslin cloth on the outlines of the letter and walked north down Main Street to see how it looked from a distance.

A month later the concrete “C,” measuring over 80 feet in length and 24 feet wide and painted in white, was formally presented to then-college president Robert Elliott by the 1923 and 24 class presidents. Plans for the monumental insignia included having incoming freshmen paint the “C” each fall, “though whether this suggestion will be followed has not been definitely determined,” the Chadron Journal reported.

Not long after the letter was in place, one student extolled its significance in these words:

“The C is a majestic letter, standing proudly against its background of sunburnt grass on pine-tufted hills. The letter, so commanding on the hillside, inspires me. It means, in my mind, the call of education, the symbol of learning Chadron.”

For a few years after the “C” was built, the college had a lantern walk on the hillside in conjunction with commencement ceremonies. Lines of students carrying Japanese lanterns would ascend the hill and outline the letter, the college band would play and townsfolk assembled at the base of hill would honk their horns.

“Claxons of automobiles for miles around made the welkin ring with the indications of their love for the college,” The Eagle reported after one ceremony.

The tradition of having new freshmen paint the “C” apparently didn’t take hold as quickly, though The Eagle did report in 1926 on other initiation rituals for new students, including wearing green colored hats and only being allowed to use certain doors for entering college buildings.

The repainting ritual eventually did catch on, though, according to Marshall, who wrote a story about the “C” on the occasion of CSC’s 100th anniversary in 2011. “Observers noted that often more paint wound up on the students than was applied to the concrete,” Marshall said.

Paint has also been applied in more creative ways at times, Marshall reported, including red barber pole stripes on occasion and a bright green coating another time.

Painting the “C” is no minor task, as students in the Project Strive/TRiO program discovered a few years back, when they applied 35 gallons of paint to spruce up the letter prior to spring graduation.

The letter’s visibility was also enhanced, though not in a pleasant way, when a wildfire nearly engulfed the CSC campus in the summer of 2006. A photo taken a day after the fire shows the “C” clearly outlined by charred prairie grasses and remains as a symbol of the near-tragedy.

A year after the fire, the Chadron C’s alphabetical rank made it an early entry in a book, “Hillside Letters A to Z - A Guide to Hometown Landmarks” by Evelyn Corning. The story of the “C” is one of 60 Corning recounts in the book, which includes a list of 426 hillside letters across the country that she was able to locate in her research.

Although no longer the focus of lantern walks and freshmen initiation rites, the gift that two early classes of Chadron State College graduates made to their alma mater has become an icon of the college and a symbol of pride for the community.

That the “C” would be a permanent feature of the campus landscape was clear years ago to an anonymous student who wrote the following lines, probably with tongue firmly in cheek:

“Men will come and men will pass.

Class will follow class.

But the C will remain in any event.

Because it’s made of Portland cement.”