Mission Park

This article contains information about the residence houses and spaces in the Mission complex. Were you looking for information about the dining hall located in Mission? See Mission Dining Hall.

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Mission Park consists of 4 houses put together to form one huge ugly award-winning concrete monstrosity. The 4 houses are Armstrong, Pratt, Mills and Dennett. It looks like a dungeon (or parking garage, depending on whom you ask) from the inside, a cinder block from the outside, and (reportedly) a phoenix from above. However, since the Summer 2003 renovations, it's extremely nice on the inside, featuring large, well furnished lounges for every four hallways, and general lounges on the ground floor with two televisions, two pool tables, and an old but still awesome foosball table. Many people also think Mission is attractive from the outside, especially when you are walking down mission hill and can see Mission Park with the mountains in the background. The effect can be quite stunning.

The complex's class make-up has changed over the years. When it was initially built in the early 1970's, it had a mix of sophomores, juniors, and seniors. From the 1980's until Spring 2006, the vast majority of Mission was sophomore housing; beginning in Fall 2006, Mission will be exclusively first-year housing.

There has been debate as to whether Mission in fact looks like a bird from above. Judge for yourself:

<googlemap version="0.9" lat="42.716727" lon="-73.202838" type="satellite" zoom="17" width="550" selector="no" controls="none"> (A) 42.716703, -73.203921, Armstrong House (P) 42.716711, -73.203374, Pratt House (M) 42.716656, -73.202827, Mills House (D) 42.716403, -73.202441, Dennett House </googlemap>

Relationships between residents of West College and Mission Park are considered long-distance relationships.

History

This page was derived from an article written for the Williams College Archives.

Twelve years after the incorporation of Williams College in 1793, the Second Great Awakening spread from its origins in Connecticut to Williamstown, Massachusetts. Enlightenment ideals from France were gradually being countered by an increase in religious fervor, first in the town, and then in the College. In the spring of 1806, Samuel J. Mills, the twenty-three year old son of a Connecticut clergyman, joined the Freshman class. Mills, after a period of religious questioning in his late teens, entered Williams with a passion to spread Christianity around the globe.

On a sultry Saturday afternoon in August, 1806, Mills and four other students gathered as usual in the maple grove of Sloan's Meadow for one of their twice-weekly prayer meetings. Thunderclouds broke open the sky, driving the students to seek shelter from the rain on the lee side of a great haystack. With thought turned toward their classroom studies of Asia and the East India Company, Mills shared his burden that Christianity be sent abroad. With the exception of Harvey Loomis, who felt that missionary efforts should first be concentrated domestically, Mills, Byram Green, Francis L. Robbins, and James Richards prayed that American missions would spread Christianity through the East.

In 1808, Mills and other Williams students formed "The Brethren," a society organized to "effect, in the persons of its members, a mission to the heathen." Upon the enrollment of Mills and Richards at Andover Seminary in 1810, Adoniram Judson from Brown, Samuel Newall from Harvard, and Samuel Nott from Union College joined the Brethren. Led by the enthusiasm of Judson, the young seminarians convinced the General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts to form The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810. In February, 1812, Rev. and Mrs. Judson, Rev. and Mrs. Newall, Rev. and Mrs. Nott, Rev. Gordon Hall, and Rev. Luther Rice were commissioned as the Board's first missionaries and set sail for Calcutta, India.

Though only two of the five Williams students at the Haystack Prayer meeting ever left the United States, the impact of their passion for missions is widespread. Loomis, true to his early convictions, dedicated his life to domestic missions in the State of Maine. Robbins engaged in missionary work in New Hampshire before returning to pastor a church in his native state of Connecticut. Green preached for a short time before serving in New York State government and later in the U.S. Congress. Richards left America in 1815, serving as a missionary in India until his death in 1822. Mills engaged in missions in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, in the Southwest United States, and in New Orleans. He influenced the founding of the American Bible Society and the United Foreign Missionary Society before he died in 1818 while returning from a short-term mission trip to Africa with the American Colonization Society.

In 1854, the Hon. Byram Green returned to Williamstown and marked the location of the haystack next to which he had prayed forty-eight years earlier. Interest in the site peaked and in 1855 a group of Williams College alumni purchased a ten-acre tract of land to commemorate the Haystack Prayer meeting. In 1857, Williams President Mark Hopkins and two other alumni, Professor Albert Hopkins and Charles Stoddard, incorporated the Mission Park Association for the purpose of "improving the grounds...and of erecting and placing thereon suitable monuments and other memorials, to commemorate the origin and progress of American Missions." The park was deeded in trust to Williams College in 1885.

After visiting Williamstown in August, 1866, the Hon. Harvey Rice (Williams Class of 1824) elected to donate the funds to "erect a monument of some kind, on the sacred spot in Mission Park" that Green had marked more than a decade earlier. The twelve-foot tall marble monument, quarried and crafted in the Berkshires, was dedicated by President Mark Hopkins following the Baccalaureate Discourse on Sunday, July 28, 1867. The monument, approved by the Faculty and Trustees of the College, mounts a globe three feet in diameter and proclaims, "The Field is the World." Beneath this inscription is a similitude of the haystack and the names of the five students who sought its shelter while in prayer.

Though the original intent was to "embellish the Park with specimens of the trees and shrubs and flowers of every foreign land to which missionaries have been sent" as can be acclimated to the New England weather, this vision never fully materialized. The most dramatic addition to the landscape of the Park was the 1969 construction of the "Mission Park" dormitory. Though the bulk of the building lies on adjacent lands, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts granted permission for the eastern and westernmost wings to extend into the Park provided the dormitory be given a name of commemorative significance. To that end, "Mission Park" includes four houses named after Mills (Class of 1809) and fellow Williams alumni Samuel Armstrong (1862), James Pratt (1898), and Tyler Dennett (1904)