All that remains in its place is a stray gas line, a utilities cover and a memorial.

Not so long ago, an entire building stood here.

Miller Hall was iconic. In its old age, it was falling apart, but it represented entire eras. More than that, it represented Ashland College—and Ashland University— and its growth throughout those eras.

Built in 1922, Miller was the original Ashland expansion project. In those early years, it added classroom and office space for the growing Ashland College and was the fourth building on campus, joining old Founders Hall, the old gymnasium and Allen Hall, a dormitory.

Miller grew with the rest of the university. Right until the end, it served a purpose.

It was well worn.

It was no diamond, but it certainly was a pearl. The building had a certain collegiality about it; the aged limestone that accented the red brick is so characteristic of the university’s architecture.

The cupola atop the building was not beautiful, but it was unique. Even with the building on its deathbed—the Cabinet was debating its demolition at the time—that cupola was included with the archway of the Rybolt Corridor in the newest Ashland University logo; the top of the cupola rises higher than anything else in that logo.

Looking south at Miller’s front doors, its age was obvious beyond the year engraved above the doorway. Vines crawled upward along the northwest corner of the building. The two steps leading up to the front door were literally worn down in the center from the years of treading upon them.

Today, if you stand on the path that used to lead up to the front door and face south, you can feel the old building. If you squint, you can see the front doors.

Close your eyes again, and you’re transported back in time. Close your eyes, and you can walk right in.

• • •

Pulling the door open, the first thing you see are the stairs leading up to the second floor and down to the first. You decide to go down.

Before the stairs on your left, you pass a white radiator. There is also one on your right. You will see these radiators all around the building; Miller is the only building on campus that uses a steam boiler for heat in the winter.

Down the stairs, you find a doorway to your right. Behind it is a hallway that connects to five offices; however, you decide to go through the doorway immediately to your right, into office 10A.

• • •

Before the College of Business and Economics moved into the current building in 2004, Miller was home to the college, and office 10A was accounting professor Kristine Parsons’.

“I called it the dungeon,” Parsons said.

It was an inside office without windows. It had no air conditioning and smelled like mold—the first floor windows tended to flood in heavy rains, and the floor was carpeted.

• • •

You walk around into other offices in the corridor, but all you find are boxes strewn about with keyboards and computer parts inside. At this point—so close to the end—the floors are not covered in carpet anymore. No, they are raw cement now, stripped to prevent the mold from forming. The fittings around the radiators have left even the floor and wall around them covered in rust.

The cement floor is flaking apart.

You leave and walk back out into the main hallway. Across the hall, there is another classroom, 11, but you don’t stop there. In an earlier time, this classroom had bright red carpet covering the floor.

You continue down the hall until you reach Room 15 on your left. The door is closed, but you open it and walk in.

• • •

There is a class in session, Louis Mancha’s philosophy of human nature. It is 2004.

He is lecturing from the podium, as he prefers. Mancha enjoys teaching his courses here. He has his lecture prewritten—jokes included—and doesn’t need an overhead for a slide presentation. He prefers the chalkboards of Miller to a dry erase board.

“It [is] a low-tech building, but that [does] not bother me,” Mancha will say.

He also likes the classroom set up with tables and chairs, so there is ample space for students to spread out. It is open, freeing.

• • •

Back in the hallway, there are two open doors in front of you as you continue to head toward the stairs on the south end. You pass a fire extinguisher placed conspicuously on the wall to your right. Just past it is a door.

You walk up to it, take a step in and see a mess of wood. On the floor, there is a topless cabinet laid in the center of the room. There are other pieces of wood furniture around it. There is also a large, blue metal closet-sort-of-thing, but you don’t know exactly what it is. Its door is unattached and leaning away from the closet.

There are also plates on the floor, boxes and boxes and boxes of plates. You count six boxes, but you can’t see very well.

You can’t see that this used to be an office common area, instead of a storage room.

• • •

There used to be a chimney in this space. Even when Khushwant Pittenger got here in 1987, though, it was no longer used.

The only problem: it wasn’t sealed properly, either.

Pigeons could get in. And during Pittenger’s first year here, one pigeon did.

“You could hear the poor thing flapping and squealing,” she said. “At first I was like, ‘What is that, what is that?’

“It took a long time to realize that it was a live bird. And there was nothing we could do about it.”

Eventually, netting was put up to keep birds out.

Somehow, birds would still die in the chimney. When they did, the business faculty in those Room 16 offices knew. Without any kind of ventilation—the common area had no windows—the smell was putrid.

• • •

You take a step back and look at the hallway that you just navigated. There are things strewn everywhere. There are papers on the floor. Desks, shelves, tables and chairs are pushed as close to the walls as they can go, but the once wide hallway is now narrow. There is no life here.

Turning around, you head toward the near stairwell. There are five stairs up to the back door.

As you walk up, you see leaves scattered about the landing. It’s fall. The leaves have gotten in as physical plant workers have come and gone, preparing the building for its final days. Cleanliness is no longer an issue, no longer a concern.

You can see the path that the workers have taken; the leaves are parted around it. Next to the doorway on this landing, there is a lone wood chair placed in front of a covered radiator. Below is a cardboard tube embossed with, “POSTER DO NOT BEND.” They look abandoned.

You turn back and place your hand on the wood railing of the stairwell and head up to the second floor. With each step, the old stairwell creaks. When you get to the top, you notice a stark contrast from the floor below. The ground floor was lit by fluorescent lights; the ceiling was a drop ceiling with square tiles.

Up here, the hallway is much more open. The lamps above are very post-modern. The ceiling is taller than it was downstairs. It is still carpeted up here.

You turn right and walk into the first office on your left, Room 28.

• • •

When Jayne Waterman came to AU in the fall of 2006, there was no room for her to have an office in the Arts and Humanities building—now the Center for the Arts—with the rest of the English faculty. She was placed in an office in Miller.

At this point, only Waterman and the religion professors have their offices in the building. As a result, there is very limited foot traffic around Waterman’s office. All of the religion department’s offices are on the third floor, while Waterman’s is down here on the second.

She looks outside a lot; there is a tree outside her window. The squirrels like this tree, especially the black squirrels. They hang out outside her office, peering in from time to time.

The squirrels keep her company.

• • •

There are still things strewn about in this hallway, but it is considerably cleaner than the first floor. Only a few pieces of furniture are pushed up against the walls, and there is a single, small metal garbage can that is tipped over on the far side of the hall. You head into one of the classrooms to see if they look any different than the rooms on the ground floor.

• • •

The overhead projector screen was in the front of the classroom, placed above the chalkboard. It hung there rolled up most of the time. It waited to be pulled down; it even had a string dangling from the handle to make it easier.

At the very beginning of class one day, Pittenger had trouble getting the screen to come down. Becoming frustrated, she yanked at the rope for the screen.

One of the brackets came out of the wall and the whole apparatus came down on top of her, striking her in the head, opening a gash to the side of her right eye. Reflexively, she pulled her hand to her head, not noticing the blood.

She screamed.

“Oh shit!”

Not one to curse, Pittenger’s shriek caught the attention of Don Rinehart, who heard her while he himself was teaching. Rinehart came running.

“When I heard your voice say, ‘oh shit’, there had to be something seriously wrong,” he said.

He came behind Pittenger and held her by the shoulders as she leaned forward with blood running from her head, through her hand and onto the ground. The class was in shock. He guided her to a chair outside the classroom, and he ran downstairs. When he came back with a can of Coke, Pittenger was confused.

“I don’t drink Coke,” she said.

“No, Khush, you need to put it on your eye until we can get you medical attention!”

While all this was going on, her class was still sitting, unsure of what to do. Before she was taken to the hospital, Pittenger gave a colleague the teaching notes and plan for her class that day.

“You need to go teach my class,” she told him.

“I don’t think your students are interested in hearing about what you were going to teach,” he said. “I think they’re more worried about you.”

She left, and he did finish up the class period. Pittenger missed the next few days with a black eye and 16 stitches. While she was gone, she was told that almost every student came to the faculty offices and asked how she was doing.

• • •

You keep walking down the hallway, looking down at the things around you. Most give no indications about where they came from, or why they are there. As you walk past one large piece of furniture to your right, there is a door that is open. As you step to go inside, you notice a torn up sheet of paper that is hanging out from beneath the door. You close the door to see around it, and become even more confused. There propped against the wall are two large pieces of cardboard, taller than they are wide, with a line sketch of a human bust taped to them.

There are holes in the bust arranged in a pattern as if they were used for target practice. As if they were shot at.

• • •

It is the first week of Aug. 2010. There is cardboard duct taped over every glass surface in sight. In the second floor hall, there are two students laying perpendicular to the walkway. They are marked as injured.

A rumble of people is coming up the stairs.

BANG! BANG!

The sound of a 12-gauge shotgun firing echoes throughout the building. It sounds like it might be coming from above.

The rumble appears to be 20 police officers. They are dressed in full gear, wearing masks and helmets, and are carrying firearms in a ready position. They’re looking for something; they walk right past the people laying on the ground. They check every room, quickly working through the floor.

Behind them are EMS personnel that attend to the people on the ground.

The officers are not afraid to shoot; their modified firearms are loaded with simunition rounds. These rounds have the same brass casing as active ammunition rounds, but are loaded with less gunpowder and fire a small rubber paint round instead of a bullet.

These officers are participating in an active shooter training exercise coordinated by Lt. David Lay (who has since been promoted to captain). Lay got a call from Rick Ewing, the vice president of facilities management, earlier in the summer. Ewing said that the building was being prepared for demolition.

Miller is the perfect place to hold one of these training exercises because it is set up so much like a stereotypical school building. With the increase in school violence in recent years, it’s also an opportunity for Lay to coordinate the training between local police divisions so that, in a worst-case scenario, the divisions are all educated to respond to a school threat in the same way.

• • •

You keep walking down the hallway, past the items on either side of you. You keep going until you get to the stairwell, where you see an office that is in between floors. It is small, but you go inside. Out the window is a gorgeous view of the east half of Founders’ Lawn. On the desk are piles of blue examination books. From the writing on the covers, you can determine that this used to be Peter Slade’s office. The books are from the final exam in Slade’s Introduction to the Bible class. There are more on the shelf behind the desk, but you can’t see most; there are papers strewn everywhere.

• • •

Around 1998, this office was turned upside down. Before it was Slade’s office, it was David Aune’s. In about 1998, one of Aune’s advisee’s pranked him, turning things in the office upside down. The drawers in the desk were turned upside down so that when Aune opened them, everything just fell out on the floor. Even the pictures on the wall were hung upside down.

• • •

Continuing up the stairs, you reach the third floor. You heard that, back when this used to be the library, students from the college brought a cow up here as a prank. As the story goes, the cow had much more trouble getting down the stairs than it did getting up them. Even looking for them, you can’t find any kind of tracks telling you whether or not this story is true.

The only thing hanging on the walls of this floor is a large photo, a side-view of the Dauch College of Business and Economics. There are bulletin boards, but they are empty. You keep walking all the way down the hallway, until you reach the last door on your left, Room 41.

• • •

On or about the afternoon of Sept. 7, 2002, David Aune was climbing up to grab a book in his office, a Hebrew concordance. Dr. Jeffery Tiel and some of the other religion professors were asking about some of the specific wording in the story of creation in the Hebrew Bible.

There were two of these books on Aune’s bookshelf, on the top shelf. It just so happens that his bookshelves were about 12-feet tall. He climbed up, reached the top shelf, grabbed the book and started to make his way down when he fell, landing with his back hitting his desk. He suffered a compression fracture in one of his lower vertebrae.

• • •

You find a staircase leading up to the attic, but it is locked. From the outside of the door, it smells like feces. You turn around and head back down the stairs. You make your way back to the second floor, and there is a single flower that is missing its pot. You look at it, but there is nothing you can do.

• • •

It is Dec. 2010. All that is left in Miller—ironically—are remnants of the past. The building’s lone remaining use is as an archive storage space.

Next to archivist Dave Roepke’s desk are three metal bookshelves holding papers. There are six shelves on each of the bookshelves, and each is filled with papers. Some are bound in books, others are hidden in steel-blue boxes stored side-by-side. There are papers stacked underneath stacks of manila folders, which have other papers inside.

Even on top of the shelves, there is a brown folio and even more boxes that are all full of papers.

This is nothing.

In his office alone, there are 15 metal filing cabinets with a total of 53 drawers.

There are four other rooms filled with record storage boxes stacked four, five or six high on utility shelves. Some are brown, some are black, some are white, but all are filled with things from the past. There are even more filing cabinets.

In the mid-1960s, what is now Roepke’s office used to be the admissions office. It was the first place that most prospective students would go when they visited. Today, it is the resting place for artifacts. Tomorrow, even those will be gone.

Box by box, the archives will be taken by physical plant workers out into the hallway and placed onto a conveyor system. With a push, each box makes its way down the hallway.

Click, click, click.

Each click is quieter as the box gets further and further away.

When it reaches the end of the hall, the box falls onto plywood sheets lined up down the split flight of stairs and slides down. It ends up outside of the south doors where an AU truck is parked, ready to take it away.

• • •

Room 33, or what used to be room 33, is the first to go.

The yellow Caterpillar excavator begins on the northeast corner of the building. The little bucket on the end of the hydraulic arm moved the gutter and flashing out of the way first. With the metal bent and drooping, the scoop rose again to third-floor-level.

The first bricks fell to the ground as the north wall of the classroom disappeared. The excavator took one big bite out of the building.

A team of two excavators chomped on the bricks, glass and metal for the next two weeks. Slowly, the building was eaten from north to south.

Slowly, it fell into the ground. Several yards away, the cupola that once sat atop the building watched, propped up now on a makeshift two-by-four structure instead of a roof. As the bricks fall, some are loaded into dumpsters for removal. Others are used to create a hill for the excavator to climb on top of and continue the demolition from.

From the cupola, you can see completely inside the building, like the cross-section of a specimen. There’s the attic, the third floor, the second floor, the first floor, all in front of you.

Just before the excavators take out an internal wall, a chalkboard hangs on what is now, temporarily at least, an external wall. The board is blank, but is the only green thing in sight. In time, it too falls to the ground along with that wall. In time, all of the walls fall. The piles of bricks are picked up and carried away. The hole in the ground is filled with dirt and seeded with grass.

In time, the cupola is replaced as a memorial almost exactly where it was on top of the roof. It is still the tallest point of the building, even though the building itself has sunk into the ground.