A Moment in Marshall History

South Hall/Holderby Hall

By Melanie Whitt

“There’s South Hall…”

Every time Chuck Landon drives past his old stomping ground on Fifth Avenue in Huntington, he reminisces. And in May 2025, he had a rare opportunity to take one final look inside.

“It feels really strange,” Landon said. “It hasn’t changed. It’s all the same. The drawers are the same. This was the closet. … Clothes were at a minimum back in those days.

“I had a roommate who was the catcher on the baseball team and he would take fruit and vegetables, raise up the window and wing cars as they drove by.” Originally built in the early 1960s with only four floors to house male students, South Hall was later expanded in 1968 to become a nine-floor, coed residence hall, with 250 student rooms, eight resident adviser rooms, two apartments and a cafeteria. In 1980, the building was renamed Holderby Hall, in honor of James Holderby, who sold 1 ¼ acres of his farm for $40 to help establish Marshall Academy in 1837.

“There was a campus phone and a payphone here…” Walking through the then-decommissioned building being prepared for demolition, memories flooded back.

“There’s the bathroom — it’s a little bit worse for wear. They didn’t have separate showers back in those days, you just had a shower room.” Landon lived in what was then South Hall in the late ’60s into the early ’70s.

“It’s a really melancholy feeling because it’s going to get torn down.” Melancholy, in part, because Landon experienced some of his best days and also some of his worst while living there. His most vivid memory of South Hall was Nov. 14, 1970, the night of the Marshall plane crash that claimed the lives of everyone on board, including close friends he had made while living on the sixth floor.

“The guys right next to me were Freddy Wilson and Bob VanHorn, who were killed in the crash. The guy across the hall was killed — I used to play ping-pong with him in the dorm at 2 a.m.” As with any teenager living in a residence hall for the first time away at college, the shared experience was the tie that binds.

“It was just unthinkable,” Landon said. “We were upstairs shooting pool when word started leaking out, so we all went down. A friend of mine had a car, so we jumped in. People came out and rushed to the scene and we were all turned away. It was hard to believe that an airplane of that size could crash the way it did. It was a long, long night. We had a prayer meeting down the hall.

“We stayed up all night, then waited at Boney’s on the corner. There was a Herald-Dispatch box there. We waited for the paper to come out because that would make it true. Then the paper came out.” After that, life for Landon in South Hall dramatically changed.

“Campus was closed for a week and still, we struggled. I was a sportswriter for the school paper and the sports editor was killed in the crash, so I had to take it over for him. I held that position for the next 2½ years.

“It was a tough time, a really tough time. We would be playing cards and then hear a girl beating on the closed door of one of the football players who died. She’d be wailing and crying and we’d have to go get the authorities. That was a common thing in those months after that. It happened all the time.

“It (Huntington) was a very close-knit community then, even more so than it is now.” Decommissioned in May 2019, Holderby Hall reopened a few of its floors in spring 2020 to house sick students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Four floors were opened up again for students in fall 2024 as a low-cost option to help with overflow student housing. Staff offices for Housing and Residence Life continued to operate on the ground floor of the building during those years.

The building’s claim to fame came in spring 2006, when scenes from “We Are Marshall,” a movie which told the story of the Marshall plane crash, were filmed on the top floor.

Now, 62 years after the building went up, it’s being removed to make room for new beginnings on campus. First, green space for students, then perhaps eventually, a more modern structure.

As Landon soaks in one final spectacular view of campus from the top, the decades of change since he lived in South Hall as a student are evident.

“That building wasn’t here, and those trees weren’t there,” he said. “All of that section with the trees weren’t here. …Gullickson is still where it is.”

It’s a really melancholy feeling because it’s going to get torn down.

– Chuck Landon

while touring the building in May