The hallway ceiling is plywood on a wooden frame. Lawrence Kocher favored plywood as a building material because it was inexpensive and suitable for unskilled labor. He designed rooms based on 8 x 4 foot units, which necessitated as few cuts in the plywood as possible. By framing the hallway ceiling with wood and then overlapping the frame with plywood panels, Kocher avoided the necessity of finishing an edge created when two plywood edges meet.

The walls of the halls are finished with wormy chestnut from trees killed by a blight twenty years earlier. The floors are oak cut from the college property. In 1941 the college could not afford enough chestnut to complete the halls. In the summer of 1944, the college located 2,300 board feet of random width chestnut and partially completed the hall facing. A year later Mary Gregory managed to locate additional wormy chestnut to complete the facing.

Recessed ceiling lights purchased at a discount from the New York World's Fair are used in the hallways and studies.

Note: The partitions in the hallway have been added by Camp Rockmont.

Photographs: Black Mountain College Project