Thursday, 8:30 a.m. It was early for a campus whose students were just beginning their holiday weekend.

A few of them meandered along Hillsborough Street, struggling to make it until their morning coffee. Others diligently packed their cars on East Campus, anticipating a short break before the onslaught of dead week.

But for the crew of Campbellsville Industries, the day was just beginning.

The mid-April weather was kind to them this day. A cool breeze played over the grass, transformed a vibrant green by recent thunderstorms.

In a cloudless sky, the morning sun shone through the trees, reflecting off a large copper dome, bolted to a trailer attached to a company truck.

This was what the crew, along with various other onlookers, was focusing on. It was one of two pieces of a cupola, an ornamental structure set to adorn the roof of Berry Hall in the Quad.

But on this pleasant day, the company’s crew was doing more than simply installing a piece of pretty architecture.

They were repairing damage inflicted a little more than 50 years ago on a day that wasn’t so calm or pleasant.

A day that saw the cupola completely ripped from its mount atop Berry by what experts still call the worst storm that has ever affected North Carolina.

Hazel’s fury

Hurricane Hazel made landfall Oct. 15, 1954, on the southern shores of North Carolina.

A Category 4 storm, it brought winds measured at 125 mph at Wrightsville Beach and 90 mph in Raleigh-Durham, according to Assistant State Climatologist Ryan Boyles.

The eye of the storm, Boyles said, ripped right through Raleigh itself.

“It went right up through the middle of the state, ” Boyles said. “A lot of people in the area were affected by high winds that weren’t used to that.”

He said the storm was “worse than hurricanes Fran and Floyd by orders of magnitude.”

“Having seen the photos, it was a worst-case scenario for what could have happened in the area,” Boyles said. “It was memorable all up and down the East Coast.”

For Troy Doby, a 1956 graduate in civil engineering, the storm was more than photos. He was there, sitting in English class in the basement of the original Pullen Hall. This building, located near Peele Hall, burned down in 1965.

Although Boyles said there were systems to track storms, they were nowhere near advanced enough to properly evaluate the storm’s danger.

“The main tool we use now just wasn’t available then — the satellite,” he said. “They didn’t have a warning system.”

But Doby said he did remember a warning system, although it wasn’t much of one.

“They said we might have a storm — and we did,” Doby said. “We looked out across the Court of North Carolina and we saw this wall of wind and debris.”

He said he and a friend immediately jumped up to close the windows, despite the protests from his professor.

“He yelled, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ and we just kept putting them down,” Doby said. “Then he saw what we were doing.”

The rain was also heavy, although he said it was not uncharacteristic of a typical bad storm.

“We just had droves of rain — 90 degrees some times,” Doby said. “An umbrella didn’t do any good.”

Boyles said one reason Hazel was able to sustain its high winds was because of its high speed of travel.

The sky was clear by the afternoon, Doby said, and he said as far as he knew, classes weren’t canceled.

“Nothing shut the campus down then,” he said.

On his way home, Doby said he encountered more problems.

“I got in my car and tried to drive down Hillsborough Street and there was this big tree lying in the road by the North Carolina Equipment Company,” he said. “I got home, but the wind was really bad.”

The Technician reported further damage in their Oct. 21, 1954, edition in a short blurb about Hazel, mentioning the storm had been “kind to State College last week.”

“Regular communications with the coast were entirely cut off and members of the Amateur Radio Club on campus kept Raleigh and Governor [William] Umstead in contact with the people east of Raleigh during and after the storm,” the unsigned report read.

The publication also reported that winds ripped off the press box in Riddick Stadium during the storm.

The report mentioned the Berry Hall cupola, although it incorrectly stated it was the cupola on Becton Hall.

To Boyles, Hazel is a reminder of nature’s wrath, and how far that wrath can reach.

“It’s amazing how easy we can forget the damage these storms can do,” Boyles said. “Even inland, we are vulnerable.”

An unraveling mystery

According to the cupola project’s manager Ryan Breedlove, it’s not surprising that the storm did so much damage to Berry’s ornament. At that period in history, he said, there weren’t many concrete Hurricane rating systems in place for structures like this.

But what happened to the structure after it was separated by the storm is still somewhat of a mystery, according to Assistant Director of East Campus Tim Blair.

Although he said there have been attempts to find out, no new information has surfaced about its whereabouts.

“It could have been so damaged it was not worth saving,” Blair said.

Some past University officials were even confused as to what happened to the structure in the first place, as indicated by a hand-written note by former University Archivist Maurice Toler in the spring of 1996.

“There was a cupola on ninth (Berry) dormitory when it was built [in 1939],” Toler wrote. “It was later removed — we haven’t been able to find out when or why.”

Icing on the cake

But officials eventually found enough information to initiate the reconstruction of a new cupola based on the original blueprints from 1938.

According to Blair, who said he has made the installation of this cupola a personal goal, the new model is a little shorter to become more aerodynamic and resistant to wind shear.

Blueprints said the structure is able to withstand wind speeds up to 100 mph.

That’s plenty stable, according to Breedlove.

“I really feel like the whole building would go before that would,” he said.

It’s a good thing too, since the $35,000 piece of architecture, weighing in at 3,800 pounds, took 10 to 12 weeks for Campbellsville Industries to fabricate.

A tribute to the past, East Campus housing staff have placed old photos of Berry Hall, with its original cupola, in the lobbies of the newly renovated common building, located right across from Berry.

According to Blair, following months of renovations adding air conditioning, new facilities and landscaping to the Quad, the cupola is a sign that the area has come full circle.

“I’ve been on campus a number of years and we’ve been talking about getting a cupola for a while,” Blair said. “It’s just a great time to do it with the renovation in the Quad.”

Observing crews placed the capstone on the project Thursday, and University Housing Director Susan Grant echoed Blair’s sentiment.

“It’s icing on the cake for the whole Quad area,” she said.