Whether you’re new to AU or a longtime Eagle, here are 21 things to know about campus history.

Athletics moments that didn’t last

• In 1926, AU students voted for the official school colors to be orange and blue. That color combo—which belongs to another AU—eventually gave way to red and blue. 

• AU competed on the gridiron for 16 seasons from 1926 to 1941, tallying an abysmal 24–67–6 record. In fall 1969, AU approved club football and a trustee donated $30,000 to cover half the expenses for three years. Club football ran through 1976.

A storied history

• At the Civil War began in 1861, the high ground between Ward Circle and the Katzen Arts Center was home to Fort Gaines—a Union defense on the rural fringes of DC that President Abraham Lincoln once visited. 
• When the US entered World War I in 1917, AU offered its 91-acre campus—which then included just Hurst and McKinley—to the army. About 100,000 camouflage artists, foresters, and more trained at camps American and Leach from the time the US entered the war until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

Tree of a kind

• The oldest and largest of AU’s more than 6,000 trees—the scarlet oak—is on the quad in front of the East Quad Building, the original home of the School of International  Service. The official tree of DC was first photographed in 1893 on what is now the quad.
• Syngman Rhee—who would later become the first president of South Korea—planted the first four of AU’s famous cherry trees by the East Quad Building in 1943. Today, the AU Arboretum and Gardens boasts about 200 of the picturesque pink trees.
• Then First Lady Michelle Obama gifted a magnolia tree from the White House grounds to AU in 2012; it overlooks the President’s Office Building courtyard.
• Woods-Brown Amphitheater is home to a sapling from a tree planted by George Washington at Mount Vernon. The tulip poplar tree was presented to AU’s 15th president, Sylvia Burwell, in 2017 by the Mount Vernon Ladies Society.

Presidential seal (of approval)

• Eight sitting presidents have visited campus—including John F. Kennedy, who delivered his “A Strategy of Peace” speech, which called for an end to the arms race, at the 1963 commencement.
• President Joe Biden has come to AU six times—more than any other commander-in-chief.
• For the first three decades of AU’s history, a US president sat on the Board of Trustees.

Smells like a sellout

• On November 13, 1993, Nirvana took the stage at Bender Arena before a sold-out crowd of 1,000 flannel-clad fans. Tickets cost just $15 for what would be the grunge trio’s final DC show before frontman Kurt Coban’s death.
• Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band treated 1,200 concertgoers to four hours of tunes on November 16, 1974, in AU’s Leonard Gym. The marathon show was one of the earliest stops on the band’s years-long, seven-leg Born to Run tour.

This place is a zoo

• In 2002, the Party Animals—200 statues of donkeys and elephants, representing the two main political parties—took over the streets of DC. Fifty-nine of the statues were later auctioned off to raise money for arts programs; AU received two sets of them, which reside outside Kerwin Hall and Bender Arena.  
• Two years later, Pandamania took over the city, with 150 hand-painted statues of the National Zoo’s then-signature species. In fall 2004, 90 of the pandas were temporarily relocated to the quad before auction. Two remain in front of Mary Graydon Center.

Firsts and lasts

• Elbert Clyde Lathron, a biochemist in the Bureau of Plant Industry at the US Department of Agriculture, was awarded the first-ever degree from AU—a PhD in chemistry—in 1916. Today, AU has more than 150,000 alumni.
• In 1898, AU’s Washington College of Law became the first school of its kind founded and led by women: Ellen Spencer Mussey and Emma Gillett. Triple Eagle and suffragette Alice Paul, author of the Equal Rights Amendment, was among WCL’s first graduates.
• In 1956—under the leadership of the first Mexican American head coach of a major collegiate program—the AU men’s basketball team became the first in the DC area to integrate.
• AU’s first building, Hurst Hall, opened in 1897. Today, a second-floor classroom is home to the last remaining chalkboard on campus.

What’s in a name?

• Mary Graydon Center is named for a nineteenth-century heiress who anonymously donated more than $1 million to advance women’s education in AU’s earliest days. Shrouded in mystery, it wasn’t until 1946 that a campus building bore her name.
• Tenleytown—DC’s second oldest neighborhood after Georgetown—got its name from an area tavern owned by John Tennally. Though the spelling evolved, the name stuck.