Welcome to my tour of the Belltower.
I am excited right now because we are at the very place on our campus
where our great University began.
We're at the front steps Holladay Hall and I have a photograph taken of our original
our first building sometime in the year 1889.
That shows what our college looked like when it first began.
Everything was in this one building. The students slept on the top two floors
Went to class on the main floor and had their meals and worked out
and went to an infirmary if they got sick. It was on the lower level.
And here is a photograph of the first class of students
Our student body today looks a lot different from this picture right here
but they stood on the foot steps when this photograph was taken and that's why
I use this photograph to say that NC State began right here on these steps.
OK, I am now in the Carillon room.
which contains all of the equipment that
produces everything you hear on the Belltower.
And the most beautiful instrument in this room is the Carillon -- which I've just opened up.
It's a beautiful musical instrument but it also produces beautiful
music live on the Belltower. It has not been played very much --
In part because they aren't very many people around they know how to play it.
And show you what you can do on the control unit.
This is the unit that controls all the music and the chimes that you hear
Automatically produced on the Belltower.
So what I'm going to do now to show you what happens when I touch some of these buttons between my fingers
And listen carefully and what you're about to hear will be coming live
Out of the top of the Belltower.
Okay, I'm here at the NC State Memorial Belltower and very proud to present the key to the Belltower
to this fine young man is going to open the door.
Okay, we are now inside The Shrine room of the Belltower and
this is the most sacred place on the whole NC State campus.
It is sacred because we honor the NC State Alumni
who served in the military and who died during World War One.
And their names are on this beautiful plaque that is here in front of me.
Now when they put the plaque up, they discovered that they made a big mistake
And that mistake was that they included the name of the man who was still alive. So to correct that problem
They came in and changed his many name on the plaque.
So if you look right here
George E. Jefferson --
the man who was still alive was George L. Jeffers.
And they changed his "L" to an "E" and they put an "O" and an "N" on the end of his name.
So they created a new name and when they did that
They said that there was no known person at that time with that name
And therefore that name was designated
As a symbolic name that represents all the NC State alumni who fought in the war.
Thank you.