MSU is in the midst of 21 different building projects, notably including renovations to Campbell Hall, construction of the Multicultural Center and reconstruction of the Farm Lane bridge. But even with the influx of new building projects and renovations, there are still abandoned spaces on campus going unused as well as forgotten buildings being unearthed after a century.
“So what the heck is up with Spartan Village?” Reddit user pinklemondaezzz posted to the r/MSU subreddit 3 years ago. “Was kinda considering living there next year, but I ended up riding the bus through it today and it just looked… creepy. And like half abandoned. And kinda unkempt. I was the only one on the bus and the bus driver seriously sprinted through the whole thing.”
Though Spartan Village still functions as an on-campus apartment complex for many international students, driving past the area will reveal that nearly half of the apartments are abandoned and unkempt.
YouTube channel Denver Entertainment features a short video documenting the state of Spartan Village as of Feb. 25.
During its conception between the 1950s and 1960s, Spartan Village was designed to provide housing for the sudden flood of students seeking an education after war. Spartan Village was also a popular living space for married students, leading to an era where many children lived on campus. Due to overpopulation, some students even lived in huts.
The buildings were not designed to be long-lasting spaces and became functionally obsolete during the 1990s. Portions of the apartment complex were demolished, but the project proved too expensive for MSU and Spartan Village was left half-uninhabited for decades.
According to the Future at MSU website, Spartan Village apartments were intended to close in 2017, though they also said they “will not close Spartan Village Apartments until Phase 1 and 2 of the project are complete and operating.” This has led to the space remaining open through the summer of 2025.
Stacey Camp, associate professor of anthropology and director of the MSU Campus Archaeology Program (CAP) offered some insight into Spartan Village’s future and recent developments about its past.
“In fall of 2020, we found out that TechSmith was going to be building a building on that property, and campus archaeology was told [about that],” Camp said. “So our job as campus archeology is to go and research property that will be destroyed in the process of construction to figure out if there’s going to be any archaeology there.
TechSmith is a company founded in Okemos, Mich. which provides screen recording and video editing software. The building that TechSmith intended on having built on campus was their new headquarters, established in 2021 and culminated in a partnership between the company and MSU.
“We did a ton of research on that property, and we found out that there are two historic homesteads [there],” Camp explained. “It was a homestead farm in the 1800s, early 1900s, before it was Spartan Village, and then eventually MSU bought that property and built Spartan Village on parts of it.”
CAP is the first campus archaeology program in the United States, established in 2005 and previously led by Lynne Goldstein. The program is known as “one of the first programs in the U.S. to offer an opportunity for students to excavate their own campus.”
Through the program, Camp works to unearth the history hidden on campus alongside archaeology students, learning from items left behind at sites. Most of the undocumented assumptions made about a site’s history come from these artifacts.
“We found artifacts related to the families that lived in Spartan village from the 60s and 70s,” Camp said. “We found this really cute little toy that was an ambulance. It looks like the Ghostbusters ambulance from the original Ghostbusters movie, and what’s cool about the toy is it was painted over by the child that had it. And then we found a little tiny whistle that has white and green coloring on it. But as we were working out on the site, we found something in a pipe and it looked like a rail gun. We were very worried initially, but it was a cap gun that was sold from the 50s or 60s. When we find toys that are in fairly good condition in outhouses, which is where kids usually throw them, or in cisterns; I always envision a sibling chucking their siblings things that they really like to hide them because no one’s going to retrieve them from an outhouse.”
Spartan Village will be demolished in 2025 and redeveloped into a space including three 4-story buildings with 60 one bedroom units and 129 two-bedroom units, 244 housing units for individual students, a retail space with a marketplace and Starbucks and university administrative offices.
For now, Spartan Village remains a fixture of living history on campus, as decrepit and “creepy,” it may seem. But some parts of MSU history take a little more digging to uncover — literally.
In May 2023, construction workers happened upon a hard, concrete surface while drilling hammock poles outside of Mary Mayo Hall, later discovered by CAP to be the foundation of an observatory built in 1881.
Camp and the members of CAP were tasked with unearthing the observatory after cross-referencing historic maps with the construction site, which led them to the location of MSU’s first observatory.
The observatory was built by Rolla Carpenter in 1881, a former student and later astronomy professor who advocated for the construction of an observatory after MSU gained its first telescope.
“My campus archeologist, Ben Akey, who’s an advanced PhD student in archeology, took a crew of graduate students and undergraduates last May and put these small little holes in the ground called shovel test probes,” Camp described the process of digging up the observatory. “And I think it was the last shovel test probe that they put in the ground, which is maybe five meters, a pretty good chunk away from where that concrete pad was found, and they hit something. And even then, when Ben said they hit it, they were not really sure it was something, because again, we hit bricks, we hit concrete stuff.”
Camp continued, describing the technology behind the project and the reunion of MSU’s first observatory with its first telescope.
“Last August, knowing that we were going to come back, we were able to have a couple alumni who work with USDA to do what we call ground penetrating radar, which essentially gives you anX-ray of what’s below the ground,” Camp said. “And that ground penetrating radar showed that most of the foundation was likely intact. Then we excavated that summer and we found that nearly all the foundation was intact, and we even found where the telescope was mounted, and we have the original telescope. So we put the telescope on its original foundation, and for the first time since probably 1920 the telescope was reunited with its building.”
Next summer, undergraduates will have the opportunity to work at the dig site for credit.
Elliot Wheeler, a second-year at Lansing Community College studying anthropology, had the opportunity to be part of the observatory project through CAP and recounted their experience.
“I believe we opened up five units,” Wheeler said. “On top of the observatory foundation. We found some bricks and mounting stuff in the middle that may have been used for the pedestal foundation. We found the diameter of the observatory foundation at, I believe it was roughly five meters. And another notable thing is that we found a lead pipe going through one of the pieces through the East-most edge of the foundation.”
An archaeological program like CAP connects students with the history of their campus and offers a glimpse into how students lived hundreds of years ago.
“I’d say archeology is important in the current day, because when is it not important?” Wheeler said, explaining the significance of archaeology to students. “When is it not important to know our history? To learn from it, to understand what people have done in the past and understand how it connects to the things we’re doing today, and how we may be doing things differently, and how we can do things differently?”
Camp confirms that it’s likely the observatory discovery is not a once-in-a-lifetime event, but CAP must remain careful when unearthing historic sites.
“There’s probably other buildings under the ground all over West Circle, if not other places on campus, because a lot of our campus was a historic farmstead,” Camp said. “And then we have Indigenous sites on campus as well, but we are not able to stick a shovel everywhere on campus. We stick a shovel on the ground only when we have to, if we know there’s a construction project taking place. In an ideal world, we’re not disturbing anything; we’re trying to protect it and leave it intact and leave it in the ground.”