It's the oldest building at UMaine, and it's probably going to be demolished
Crossland Hall predates the founding of the University
In the southern corner of the University of Maine sits the oldest building on campus: Crossland Hall, a white clapboard farmhouse that since 1833 has served variously as a private residential home, an academic building, a fraternity house, a dormitory, an infirmary, the University’s alumni center and, since 2002, as the home of the Franco-American Centre. It predates the establishment of UMaine itself.
Across the street from Crossland is the Alfond Arena, the home for the beloved University of Maine ice hockey program, which in 2024 and 2025 received a $50 million upgrade to include greatly expanded facilities for both players and fans. At the end of 2025, construction is expected to begin on a new athletic facility, Morse Arena, which will eventually house the UMaine basketball program and which will be sited where a parking lot is currently located. It’s part of a multi-year expansion of UMaine’s athletic facilities, funded by a $320 million grant from the Harold Alfond Foundation.
In May 2025, a few days after the spring semester ended, staff at the Franco-American Centre were informed via an email from University of Maine administrators that Crossland Hall would be demolished. The Franco Centre would be relocated - first, to Libby Hall, and then, 18 months later, to the Environmental Science Laboratory, or ESL, both on the far northerly side of campus, which they said would be renovated. The Franco Centre would need to vacate Crossland no later than the end of the fall semester of 2025.
The plan, the email said, is to turn the lot that Crossland sits on into a parking lot, to make up for the 200 parking spots lost by the construction of the new Morse Arena, and to improve pedestrian safety in that part of campus. According to the email, Crossland also needs $10 million in “deferred maintenance,” though administrators have not said what, exactly, that maintenance is or why the cost to do it is so high.
Gabe Paquette, interim provost for UMaine, said that the demolition of Crossland Hall and the relocation of the Franco Centre is part of a larger effort to realize a series of infrastructure plans for the campus as a whole.
“The goal is to facilitate the realization of a broader strategic plan for our facilities,” Paquette said. “There are a lot of factors that come into play when we think about all the different priorities for the University when it comes to facilities - the state of our classrooms and residence halls, pedestrian safety. We have limited resources when it comes to making investments in buildings. When we think about those investments, we often have to make really difficult choices. This is one of them.”
Some students and community members that have called the Franco Centre and Crossland Hall home for the past 23 years say that the move will create more problems than it solves. Those problems include several years of moving upheaval, little available parking and a lack of disability access in both Libby Hall and the ESL, its inconvenient location in the back northern corner of campus, and the fact that the Centre’s archives will now be housed at Fogler Library, making it less accessible for the genealogy research that many of its community volunteers now undertake on site.
The Centre has for more than 50 years studied and celebrated Maine’s rich Franco-American heritage, providing a place where both the campus community and people in Orono, Old Town and beyond can come together to celebrate their culture. About 20 percent of Mainers claim Franco-American ancestry, and neighboring Old Town has long had a community of Franco-Americans living on French Island.
Alex Emery, a UMaine senior and president of the student-run Franco-American Resource Opportunity Program, which operates alongside the Franco Centre, first came to the Centre when he was a freshman first learning French. At the time, he was struggling to cope with the recent death of his mother, and said he was feeling isolated and lonely. The community at the Franco Centre, he said, welcomed him with open arms.
“Being at the Franco Centre is like being in someone’s home,” Emery said. “The hospitality is amazing. They make food. They welcome you to their table. It really feels like the spirit of Maine. And it was really important to me when I was going through a really hard time.”
In addition to student programming like after school French lessons for local children, the Centre serves as a community hub for people in Orono and Old Town including the Franco Femmes, a group of local women of Franco-American heritage. The group gathers at Crossland Hall to be together in community and to spearhead efforts like collecting donations for area food pantries, making Christmas gifts for charities and making blankets for the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter.
That’s who history graduate student Lincoln Tiner met several years ago, when he sought to find out more about some old photo albums he found in an abandoned house on French Island. The Franco Femmes and staff at the Centre connected him to the local family seen in the photos - and spurred an abiding interest in Tiner in not just Franco history in Maine, but in the history of Crossland Hall itself. Earlier this year, Tiner wrote a long history of Crossland Hall and its legacy on campus.
“This is not just University history. This is local history. This is public history,” said Tiner. “This building existed decades before the University of Maine was even founded. It’s one of the oldest buildings in Orono, too. To replace it with a parking lot just feels like a decision that’s rooted in convenience and money, and not about the kind of culture we value at UMaine.”
From the administration’s point of view, the Crossland demolition isn’t just about parking - though that’s certainly a concern. Paquette, the Provost, also said that despite the building’s nearly 200-year history and connection to many historical eras on campus, it is not considered of historical significance - even though a 2007 historic preservation study commissioned by the University designated Crossland as a “Tier 1” building, denoting buildings that are in some way considered historic.
“I would argue that for students and staff, parking is, in fact, an important thing, because that’s part of accessibility,” Paquette said. “But it’s really more about the modernization of campus, and positioning ourselves to best serve the people that call this campus home.”
Crossland’s history in some ways mirrors the many of the ways in which UMaine itself has changed over the past 150 years. The original farmhouse was built in 1833 by early white settlers on Marsh Island, a few decades after John Marsh 1purchased the island from the Penobscot people. It was among the first buildings purchased at the school’s founding in 1865 as the Maine State College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts - one of the country’s original land grant universities, as part of the federal Morrill Act of 1862.
In the 1930s, Crossland - then known as North Hall - became one of the first women’s dormitories on campus, created to support the rapidly growing ranks of women attending college. When the G.I. Bill was passed in 1944, it transformed higher education across the country - and Crossland Hall, which served as an infirmary for returning World War II veterans recovering from injuries and adjusting to civilian life, played a big role in supporting that transformation. In 1980, it was renamed Crossland Hall, to honor UMaine alum and former administrator Charles Crossland, who worked at the University for 67 years.
Today, as the home of the Franco Centre, Crossland serves as one of the few physical institutions in the state dedicated to preserving Franco-American history in Maine - a history that for many years was intentionally erased by the dominant Anglo-American culture, including the outlawing the speaking of French in schools and other public settings, and slurs and discrimination levied against Franco-Americans across the state.
Emery, Tiner and other students and community members earlier this month launched an effort to save Crossland Hall, including a petition asking the University not to tear down the building that has garnered more than 1,000 signatures. Tiner said they have heard from current and former students, staff and faculty, members of the local community and Franco-American Mainers dismayed by the plan.
“If you set aside all these points about parking and infrastructure and whatever, Crossland represents the University of Maine’s legacy, and all the different phases that it has gone through,” Tiner said. “That’s got to be worth saving.”
This was, as was nearly always the case, an exceptionally bad and shady deal for the Penobscot people. https://www.bangordailynews.com/2022/07/19/bangor/umaine-marsh-island-joam40zk0w/
Booing all of this. We have a beautiful campus and slowly but surely, all the most unique buildings are being neglected until tearing them down can be justified... all for an imagined boom of student population that demographics does not support