Wheaton College (Illinois)

==Campus==
[[File:Wheaton_College_Sign.jpg|thumb|Wheaton College Sign at Wheaton College.]]
[[File:Blanchard Hall (5978664560).jpg|thumb|Blanchard Hall houses offices for departments in the Humanities and Social Sciences as well as the offices of the President, the Provost, Vice-Presidents, and Academic Affairs.]]
Wheaton's most recognizable and oldest building is [[Blanchard Hall]], a limestone building built as the main College building in 1853. At the time, the College building was one of only two on campus, the other (called the "boarding hall") being a frame building at the foot of the hill crowned by the two-story building. Jonathan Blanchard had a vision for the expansion of this structure into its present castle-like architecture. Wheaton contends that it patterns its campus architecture after buildings at the University of Oxford which Blanchard admired on a trip to England in 1843. After four additions (1871, 1873, 1890, 1927), Wheaton completed the Main Building in 1927. That year, under college president J. Oliver Buswell, Jr., Wheaton renamed the Main Building Blanchard Hall to honor Wheaton's first two presidents, Jonathan Blanchard and his son Charles Blanchard.

Blanchard Hall served as a stop on the [[Underground Railroad]].<ref name="nps.gov"/>

===Academic===
In 1900, Wheaton built the brick "Industrial Building". From 1917 to 1945 it housed the Wheaton Academy, and from 1945 to 1960 the Graduate School. In 1960 it was renamed Buswell Hall, and in 1980 renamed Schell Hall in honor of Edward R. Schell.

Wheaton housed its science departments in Breyer ([[Chemistry]]) and Armerding ([[Biology]], [[Geology]], [[Math]], and [[Physics]]) halls until the 2010–11 school year when Wheaton completed a new Meyer Science Center. Armerding Hall was also the home to the Wheaton College Observatory (a feature of the college since the presidency of Charles Blanchard in the late nineteenth century), which Wheaton relocated to the Meyer Science Center.

The Wheaton College Conservatory of Music, housed in the Armerding Center for Music and Arts (previously in McAlister Hall and Pierce Memorial Chapel), is an internationally recognized music school and is the only conservatory within an Evangelical school of higher education. The approximately 200 students within the conservatory focus on various fields of music, including education, performance, composition, and history. Student recitals, required for graduation with a music degree, are held in the Armerding recital hall.