The House That Students Built: Alpha Tau Omega on University Terrace

In 1914 a group of University of Nevada students rented a house at Ninth and Sierra and worked out how to fill it.

Their method was simple and, for 1914, rather brilliant. When the trains came in at the start of term they went down and met them, found the students arriving from out of town who had nowhere to go and nobody to carry anything, and picked up their luggage.

They were called Phi Delta Tau, and they existed for a reason that explains a good deal about them: the men who founded it in 1912 had not been invited to join either of the two fraternities the university already had.

Seventeen years later those same men sold bonds to their own alumni, bought five lots on a hill, hired one of their own members to draw the plans, and put up the first fraternity-built house in the history of the University of Nevada. It is still standing on the windy road above campus, and it is on the National Register.

Almost nothing else from the world those students lived in survived.

The Fraternity That Started Because Nobody Asked Them

Phi Delta Tau was a purely local thing — no national body, no Greek network, just a group of Nevada students who had been passed over and formed their own. It began around 1912.

In 1921 they applied for a national charter and became the Delta Iota chapter of Alpha Tau Omega, the university's third fraternity. Alpha Tau Omega had been founded at the Virginia Military Institute in 1865 by Otis Allan Glazebrook and had more than sixty-seven chapters by the time Nevada joined it.

That same year the chapter formed the Delta Iota Building Association and bought a two-storey house at 745 University Avenue for eight thousand dollars, financed on personal loans and a bank mortgage.

And here is where this story stops being about a fraternity and starts being about a neighbourhood.

University Avenue

University Avenue is North Center Street. The stretch running north from the tracks to the campus gates carried that name for years — the 1949 Sanborn fire insurance maps still label it so — and 745 University Avenue stood a block south of the 800 block, where the Queen Annes were.

That block is the one we have written about: the Folsom house with the turret at 829, the Berry house at 839, the Sherman house at 847, the Armstrong house at 821 where Dean Reuben Thompson lived and the poet Joanne de Longchamps lived after him.

Those houses were built in the 1890s for grocers and bankers, and within a generation they were full of students. Widows rented rooms to undergraduates. Professors boarded with them. One fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, bought the John Newton Evans mansion at 835 Evans Avenue in 1924 — an 1878 Italianate with eight bay windows, built by the man who sold the state the land the university stands on — and lived in it until they pulled it down in 1953 to build something modern.

This is what the foot of the campus was: a few blocks of 1890s houses, slowly converted to student use, one of them at a time.

The ATO men looked at that and decided to build instead.

A Hundred and Fifty Men, Twenty Beds

By 1928 the Nevada chapter had a hundred and fifty men on its rolls, forty-five of them undergraduates. The house on University Avenue slept twenty.

So they did the arithmetic, and then they did something students almost never do. They raised capital.

They Sold Bonds

The Delta Iota Building Association issued ten thousand dollars in secured six per cent bonds, in denominations of fifty dollars, maturing in five years, secured by a deed of trust on the property.

Read that again with 1928 eyes. A student organisation at a state university with fewer than a thousand undergraduates went to its own graduates and sold them a corporate bond issue, at a real rate of interest, with real security behind it, and they bought it.

The rest of the stack was assets. The chapter had about twenty thousand dollars of them: the University Avenue house, owned free and clear, and three lots in Reno. They had bought lots for a new house once already and sold them again when five better ones came up on University Terrace for two thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars.

The budget was thirty-two thousand dollars, building and furnishings together — something like five hundred and eighty-six thousand in today's money. And they got there partly on luck: there was a lumber price war on in Reno that year, and it came in under what it should have.

The Architect Was One of Their Own

They did not hire a stranger. They hired Lehman A. Ferris — "Monk" Ferris — who had entered the university in 1911, left in 1915, and had been one of the Phi Delta Tau men himself. He drew the plans and supervised the construction of his own fraternity's house.

He was also the son of George A. Ferris, one of the architects who built early Reno, and who in 1913 and 1914 happened to be living at 801 North Lake Street — another of the houses the university cleared in 2020.

Before anything was drawn, members went and looked at other people's fraternity houses in Washington, Idaho, Montana and California. That is an unusually methodical thing for a group of undergraduates to do, and it shows in what they got.

Not all of it got built. The plans called for a classical portico, a glassed-in porch on the west, and three chimneys. The portico was never put on, the west porch was never glassed, and two of the three chimneys were never built. Nobody recorded why. My own guess is that the money ran out somewhere between the lumber and the furniture, which is the ordinary fate of ambitious plans, but it is a guess and I will label it as one.

What They Built

The cornerstone went down on the thirtieth of April, 1929, and the house was finished by June. It was dedicated to the memory of Judge Erskine M. Ross, one of the founders of Alpha Tau Omega.

It is Colonial — properly, side-gabled Georgian Revival — three storeys over a basement, in red brick laid in running bond with sand-coloured stone quoins at the corners. Five ranks of windows, symmetrical. A centred Georgian doorway with sidelights and a reversed pedimented crown on pilasters, with the letters ATO set above it and the coat of arms in the window above that. Three gabled dormers in the roof, a boxed eave, a brick chimney on the west gable, a single-storey wing off the northeast corner.

And then the thing you actually notice, which the National Register nomination puts better than I can: the concrete steps climbing a steep front lawn to the door, producing what it calls "a dramatic visual effect." They bought a hill and used it.

The chapter's own newsletter, the Sagehen, ran the floor plan on the tenth of June 1929 under the headline "Nevada's First Fraternity Built House." It is worth having in full, because it is a portrait of how young men were expected to live in 1929:

First floor: a reception hall sixteen by nineteen, a living room twenty-two by twenty-eight, a dining room twenty-two by twenty-two, a bedroom, a bath, a lavatory, a serving pantry and a screened back porch. Second floor: ten rooms nine by twelve, a large bathroom, and two sleeping porches ten by eighteen. Third floor: five dormitories nine by eighteen, bath and storage. Basement: kitchen, cook's room, bath, furnace room, a chapter room twenty by twenty-two — and a "rough house."

Two sleeping porches, because in 1929 it was still thought healthier to sleep in the open air. A cook's room, because there was a cook. Five dormitories on the third floor rather than bedrooms. And a room in the basement whose official designated purpose, written down in the plan, was rough house.

1943: The Women Moved In

Fourteen years later the men were gone to the war, and the Board of Regents had a housing problem of the opposite kind.

In 1943 the Regents put women students into the Alpha Tau Omega house, and ran it as the women's dining hall. Board was thirty-two dollars and fifty cents a month. A room cost thirty-six dollars a semester. The university covered the shortfall out of what the federal government was paying it to house military trainees over at Artemesia Hall.

I like this part more than any other. A house built by a fraternity founded by men who had been excluded, paid for with bonds sold to their own alumni, filled up in the war with the women students the university had nowhere else to put, and funded by rent from the army.

1984: The Fire Marshal

In 1984 the Reno fire marshal closed the house as a fire hazard and the chapter was put out of its own building.

It stayed shut for four years. The alumni association raised the money to bring it up to code — the National Register nomination puts the figure at more than five hundred thousand dollars over two years, and the chapter was back in by October 1988. (You will see fifty thousand quoted in places; the nomination, which is the document that went through professional review, says five hundred. I am going with the nomination and flagging the discrepancy rather than quietly picking one.)

The interior was renovated to code in the 1980s, and around 1987 the rear roofline was extended to enlarge the third floor and give access to the sun porch. From the street, it is the house they built in 1929.

It went on the National Register of Historic Places on the twenty-eighth of January, 2004, under both Criterion A and Criterion C — for what happened in it and for what it is — with a period of significance of 1929. The nomination was written by Mella Rothwell Harmon of the State Historic Preservation Office.

What Became of Monk Ferris

The student who drew the house had a career afterwards that most Nevadans have lived inside without knowing it.

He worked as an electrical engineer, and during the First World War on underwater detection devices. In 1935 he became Reno's first building inspector and held the job for ten years. In 1949 he chaired the first Nevada State Board of Architecture, and he held Nevada architect's licence number one. From 1946 he was in partnership with Graham Erskine.

His buildings include Las Vegas High School (1928), the high schools at Austin and Eureka, Reno High School, Hug and Wooster, the Harolds Club casino tower, the original student union and education building at the university, the Carson City Civic Auditorium, buildings for the Nevada Legislature, and First National Bank branches across the state.

He retired in 1970 at seventy-seven and died in 1996, aged a hundred and three. He outlived his own fraternity house's closure and reopening, and very nearly lived to see it listed.

Everybody Else's Houses

Now put the ATO house beside what happened to the rest of the student quarter, because the comparison is the argument.

Sigma Alpha Epsilon bought the Evans mansion — 1878, Italianate, eight bay windows, built by the man who sold the state the campus — and used it from 1924 until 1953, when they demolished it and built a brick ranch-style house on the site for about a hundred thousand dollars.

Sigma Nu is at 1075 Ralston Street. The university holds a photograph of the Sigma Nu house taken in 1934 and an archival record of an addition in 1959, and I have not yet been able to establish whether the house on Ralston today is the 1934 building or a later one. It is not on the National Register. That is the next thing I want to settle.

And the houses the students rented — the Queen Annes on University Avenue and Lake Street, the ones that had been grocers' and bankers' houses and became boarding rooms, apartments, a sorority, two fraternities and a Unity church — are gone. Twelve of them went to the university's Gateway project between 2019 and 2020. Four were moved by private buyers. The rest were demolished, including the last unbroken row of nineteenth-century houses in Reno.

The Alpha Tau Omega house is still there because in 1928 forty-five undergraduates decided not to rent.

That is the whole lesson, and it is not a sentimental one. The buildings that survived in this neighbourhood are the ones somebody owned outright and had a reason to defend. The ones that went were the ones held as income property by people who eventually had a better offer. You can admire a house all you like; what keeps it standing is whose name is on the deed and what they want.

At a Glance: The ATO House

• What: the Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity House, 205 University Terrace, Reno — the first fraternity-built house at the University of Nevada.
• National Register: listed 28 January 2004, reference #03001508, under Criteria A and C at the state level. Period of significance 1929. Nomination by Mella Rothwell Harmon, Nevada SHPO, 1 October 2003. Parcel 007-171-24, 0.54 acre.
• The chapter: began as Phi Delta Tau about 1912 — founded by men who had not been invited into the university's two existing fraternities. Chartered as the Delta Iota chapter of Alpha Tau Omega in 1921, the third fraternity on campus.
• How they recruited in 1914: from a rented house at Ninth and Sierra, by meeting arriving out-of-town students and carrying their luggage.
• First house: 745 University Avenue, bought 1921 for $8,000 on personal loans and a bank mortgage. University Avenue is the old name for North Center Street.
• The squeeze: by 1928, 150 men on the rolls, 45 undergraduates — and a house that slept 20.
• How they paid for it: $10,000 in secured 6% bonds in $50 denominations, five-year maturity, secured by deed of trust; about $20,000 in assets including the free-and-clear old house and three Reno lots; five lots on University Terrace for $2,750. Budget $32,000 including furnishings — roughly $586,000 in 2022 money — helped along by a Reno lumber price war.
• Architect: Lehman "Monk" Ferris, a member of the chapter's predecessor and son of architect George A. Ferris. Members toured fraternity houses in Washington, Idaho, Montana and California before designing.
• Built: cornerstone 30 April 1929, finished by June. Dedicated to Judge Erskine M. Ross, an ATO founder.
• The building: side-gabled Colonial/Georgian Revival, three storeys and basement, red brick in running bond with sand-coloured stone quoins, three gabled dormers, Georgian entrance with sidelights and a reversed pedimented crown, ATO above the door and the coat of arms above that, single-storey northeast wing, concrete steps up a steep front lawn for "a dramatic visual effect."
• Never built: the planned classical portico, the glassed-in west porch, and two of the three chimneys. No reason recorded.
• Inside, per the chapter's Sagehen, 10 June 1929: a 22×28 living room, a 22×22 dining room, ten 9×12 rooms upstairs, two sleeping porches, five third-floor dormitories, a cook's room, a 20×22 chapter room — and a basement room designated "rough house."
• 1943: the Board of Regents housed women students in it and ran it as the women's dining hall. Board $32.50 a month; room $36 a semester; the shortfall covered by federal rent for military housing at Artemesia Hall.
• 1984: closed by the fire marshal as a fire hazard. Reopened October 1988 after the alumni raised, per the nomination, more than $500,000 over two years. Some accounts say $50,000; the nomination says $500,000.
• Alumni: William Raggio, Grant Sawyer, Richard Bryan, Paul Bible, Jim Santini — and Merle H. Atcheson of 829 North Center.
• The architect afterwards: Reno's first building inspector (1935), chair of the first Nevada State Board of Architecture (1949), holder of Nevada architect's licence no. 1; Las Vegas High School, Reno High, Hug, Wooster, the Harolds Club tower, the original UNR student union, the Carson City Civic Auditorium, Legislature buildings. Died 1996, aged 103.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you go and see it?

Yes. It still stands at 205 University Terrace, on the hill above campus, and it is still a fraternity house — which is part of why it was listed: it keeps its original use. Look at it from the street. The steps up the front lawn are the thing to notice; they were designed to do exactly what they do to you.

What makes it historically significant?

Two things, which is why it was listed under both Criteria A and C. It is an outstanding Colonial Revival building by a notable Nevada architect, and it is the first house a fraternity built for itself at the University of Nevada — a piece of social history about how students housed themselves before the university did it for them.

Who was Monk Ferris?

Lehman A. Ferris, son of the architect George A. Ferris, a member of the local fraternity that became this chapter, and later one of the most prolific architects in Nevada. He designed the house as a young man and went on to build high schools across the state, the Harolds Club tower and buildings for the Legislature. He held Nevada architect's licence number one and died in 1996 at a hundred and three.

Why did the university's other student houses not survive?

Because they were rented or bought rather than built, and because most of them were held as income property. Sigma Alpha Epsilon demolished the 1878 Evans mansion itself in 1953. Twelve of the old houses at the foot of campus went to the university's Gateway project in 2019 and 2020; four were moved away by private buyers and the rest came down.

What about the Sigma Nu house?

It is at 1075 Ralston Street and it is not on the National Register. The university holds a photograph of the Sigma Nu house from 1934 and a record of an addition made in 1959, and I cannot yet say whether the building on Ralston today is the one in that photograph. That is unfinished work and I would rather say so.

Were women really housed in a fraternity house?

Yes — in 1943, by order of the Board of Regents, with the house also serving as the women's dining hall while the men were at the war. Board was $32.50 a month and a room was $36 a semester.

Conclusion

I keep coming back to the boys at the railway station in 1914, carrying other people's suitcases up the hill to a rented house because it was the only way they could think of to get anyone to join them.

Fourteen years later those same men were selling a secured bond issue to their own graduates. They had a building association, a deed of trust, a six per cent coupon and a five-year maturity. They sent members to four states to look at other people's buildings before they drew their own. They hired one of their own, who happened to be the son of the best architect in town, and he gave them a Georgian front, stone quoins at the corners, and a flight of steps up a steep lawn designed to make you look up as you arrived.

They could not afford the portico. They built it anyway, without the portico.

And then they lent it to the women students in the war, and nearly lost it to the fire marshal in the eighties, and got it back, and in 2004 the federal government wrote it down as worth keeping.

Meanwhile, three blocks downhill, every house those students had ever rented a room in was coming down.

There is no villain in that comparison. The difference is ownership and intention. A house that somebody built, paid for, and has defended for ninety-seven years is still a house. A house that somebody rented out, and then sold, becomes a parking garage. That is not a moral about preservation societies or university presidents. It is a moral about deeds.

Drive up University Terrace and look at the steps. Forty-five undergraduates in 1928 looked at a hundred and fifty men and twenty beds and decided the answer was a bond issue. It is still standing.

We are always drawn to the places where Nevada's history is still out there to be touched. To bring a piece of that era home, explore our curated collection at The Eclection.

Resources & Further Reading

For deeper study, these are reliable, non-commercial starting points. Nearly everything above comes from the National Register nomination, which is a federal public document and an unusually good one: it was prepared by Mella Rothwell Harmon of the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office in October 2003, and it rests in turn on the chapter's own 1928 bond offering and 1921 charter petition in the University Archives, the Sagehen of 10 June 1929, Lehman Ferris's 1970 oral history Life of a Busy Man, and the Board of Regents minutes for 1943. The Reno papers carry 164 mentions of the chapter between 1928 and 1930, which I have sampled rather than exhausted; the detailed construction and bond reporting is there for anyone who wants to take it further. The context on the houses at the foot of campus is from the Historic Reno Preservation Society and Reno Historical.

• National Register nomination, Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity House (#03001508) — the full federal file, public domain, with the architectural description, the chapter history and the financing in detail. The document of record.
• Alpha Tau Omega — Reno Historical — a short illustrated account, including a 1941 photograph of the house covered in vines and a 1985 photograph of it boarded up.
• Alpha Tau Omega, Delta Iota Chapter Records — UNR Special Collections — the chapter's own papers, where the bond offering and the charter petition live.
• Historic University Gateway (In Memoriam) — Reno Historical — the twelve houses at the foot of campus that did not survive.
• The House with the Turret: 829 North Center Street and the Atchesons — the Queen Anne a block north of the chapter's first house, and the family who held it for seventy years. Merle Atcheson was an ATO.
• Frederic DeLongchamps: The Mining Engineer Who Built Nevada — the other architect who built this state, and Ferris's contemporary.