The Siberian Mammoth of UVA
How the Great Woolly-Woolly Shook up the University of Virginia
Apr 1, 2009
On seeing the behemoth for the first time, wahoos--as University students are called--froze and stared in disbelief at a specter they thought was extinct. The creature was awesome! Next they looked for signs of life and breathed relief that the charging monster, trunk raised like a battering ram, was not closing the distance between them.
For the peace of the community, the Great Woolly-Woolly was housed out of sight in Brooks Hall, along with the geology department. Brooks Hall was the appropriate domicile for the creature that exploded out of an H.G. Wells's time machine as soon as the door opened.
Brooks Hall Could Have Been Addams Family Ancestral Home
The building was as alien to the neoclassical grounds architecturally as a tethered live woolly mammoth would have been in a petting zoo. Victorian/Gothic in style, with hints of Italian renaissance, it aroused controversy from the start. Nevertheless, it became a leading museum of natural history, in 1877 when completed, according to Prof. Jeffrey L. Hantman.
The Addams family belonged there. Carved animal heads on the arches were as medieval gargoyles to impressionistic wahoos. Had the eerie place existed when Edgar Allan Poe matriculated many years earlier, most certainly he would have preferred writing his macabre stories there, rather than his own Room 13 on the Lawn.
President Taft Saw Majestic Ugliness
The gloomy building shrieked obscenities at Mr. Jefferson’s shining Academical Village up the hill. On a visit, President William Howard Taft exhorted:
“Leave it alone . . . Don’t tear it down, don’t try to adorn it with columns and porticos. Let it stand untarnished in its perfect majestic ugliness as an everlasting example to succeeding administrations to go their way and sin no more.” [The University of Virginia: Campus Guide, by Richard Guy Wilson and Sarah A. Butler.]
Brooks as Tenacious as a Duck-billed Platypus
Brave souls studied geology in that ghoulish house. What dedication the up and coming rock docs showed; for In Darwinian terms, Brooks Hall was as inexplicable as the freakish duck-billed platypus, whose scientific categorizing confounded the astute Charles Darwin and even the Great Wahoo, Thomas Jefferson.
Showing the same perseverance as the tenacious platypus, Brooks Hall survived a demolition resolution by the Board of Visitors in 1977. Miraculously escaping the wrecking ball several other times, it has morphed into housing for art classes and the anthropology department; however, the dear old Woolly-Woolly is gone but not forgotten. Some say his ferocious spirit now resides among fund raisers in Alumni Hall.
Siberian Mammoth was an Elephant on Steroids
A woolly or Siberian mammoth was an elephant on steroids, although it was the smallest of the four mammoth types. It could stand eleven feet at the shoulders, weigh up to eight tons and brandish ivory tusks of eleven feet.
Shaped like Arabian scimitars, the tusks were formidable weapons against predators, and were built-in plows for digging up roots and berries for the mammoth’s legendary appetite of seven hundred pounds of food daily. This prodigious appetite was processed with the aid of four molars, each the size of Shaquille O’Neal’s shoe box.
First Encounter with the Great Woolly-Woolly was Electrifying
The first encounter of the day with the Great Woolly-Woolly was so electrifying that some wahoos with geology class at eight in the morning skipped coffee, knowing the towering hulk and putrefied stench of Argentine wool that Harry wore would rev their senses up to Mach-100 speed. And they were caffeine free to boot.
One day a whistle shrieked from a locomotive crossing the trestle next to the Diner, at the nearby Corner. The screech was primordial, and split the crisp early morning air like a sonic boom.
A first-year smoker lurking outside the creaky double doorway atop cascading stairways, became hysterical. He tumbled down the stairs, hardly touching one, expecting the beast to crash out behind him and rumble toward the Rotunda, looking for a shaggy mate. His roommate revealed later that the fleeting thought, My God! are there others? increased his panic.
Wahoos Saddened by Second Extinction of Siberian Mammoth
In 1948 the mammoth was dismantled into chopped wood, chicken wire and plaster, including swaths of the foul-smelling wool, and thrown on a pile outside Brooks Hall. Wahoos gathered and were stunned. Bystanders said that over the years, they had reluctantly come to admire the magnificent beast. They lamented the prehistoric avatar deserved better, maybe a 21-gun salute, rather than a second extinction.
In that heap of rubble before them was the pride of the early Pleistocene, utterly broken up and atomized over the school’s decision to tear down its domicile, beauteous Brooks Hall. That order was later rescinded. However, it was too late to save the Great Woolly-Woolly.
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