Bells that ring loud and proud can be heard all across the SDSU campus. The music comes from a tall, slim tower made of brick and stone. On top is a light so bright it can be seen from miles away at night.
The Coughlin Campanile is the face of SDSU. Its logo is on student IDs, envelopes, the school website, even tuition bills.
“A Camp-an-eel or Camp-in-eel-ie, whichever you want to call it,” says SDSU graduate Chuck Cecil.
Cecil graduated from SDSU in 1959. He says both pronunciations are correct, but is a generational thing. Cecil is also the author of the book “The Sky’s the Limit”. It’s about Charles Coughlin who paid for the complete cost of the Campanile back in 1929. Coughlin grew up in Carthage, graduated from SDSU in 1909 and made his fortune as president of the Briggs and Stratton Company.
“They [SDSU] looked at their alumni list and of course there was one person that they thought might have that kind of money,” Cecil says.
The cost was first estimated at $18,000.
“And the price kept going up, and up, and up. And they kept calling Charles Coughlin back and he was always agreeable to the new plan,” Cecil says.
The final price tag was $75,000. Work on the 165-foot-tall Campanile began on May 7, 1929. It took about three months to build.
“They started it was about 30 foot of Bedford limestone and then they went to brick. Then they have about 100 feet of brick and then you run into about 30 more feet of decorative, really decorative limestone up at the top,” Cecil says.
Cecil says brick was stacked at a rate of two to three feet a day. A stiff legged derrick was used instead of scaffolding with masons working from the inside of the structure.
“After they finished the stone work with the Campanile, then they had to install the carillons which are about a dozen long some of them ten fifteen feet long brass pipes that like that had been tuned, well they were tuned after they put them in and connected that all up with a control room in the on the ground floor of the Campanile,” Cecil says.
Workers installed a keyboard inside a control room where the carillons were played. Rolls of punched paper could also be inserted through a machine to make music play.
“And of course it called students to class and rang at the end of the class period. In the early days then not everyone had a wrist watch few people had watches. Then they’d know what time to head out to class,” Cecil says.
The carillons would also chime out the score of football games. When first installed, the carillons were so loud they could be heard from 20 miles away.
The Campanile was built to beautify the campus. It is also a part of SDSU traditions. One is the Campanile Climb. During the first week of classes, a contest is held to see who can climb up the 180 steps the fastest. The best recorded time is 32 seconds made in 1994 by former SDSU basketball player Troy Bouman.
The Campanile is also the place for romance and marriage proposals. For V.J. Smith it gets a little more intimate than that.
“I normally don’t tell anybody this but my wife and I got married in the Campanile because it was her idea. Being around here for all of those years thinking it would be kind of a neat place,” Smith says. “And so I got a hold of an old high school classmate who happens to be a minister and he had a congregation in Parkston at the time. He came up the Saturday after Thanksgiving and we got married and that was that.”
The Campanile became a part of the National Register of Historic Places in 1987. Over the years steps have been made to preserve the Campanile. A loud speaker system now plays music instead of the carillons. The carillons are now housed at the South Dakota Agricultural Heritage Museum. In 2001, a full restoration was completed on the structure.
While SDSU’s campus is changing and growing with several new buildings, Chuck Cecil reflects on the old buildings that remain.
“You know most of the buildings that were here when I was a student are gone, but the Campanile is still here. So some part of that is still around,” Cecil says.