Near the end of Flirtation Walk alongside of old Battery Knox, a Revolutionary relic, stands the Bachelor Officers’ quarters. This building of brick and limestone, serves to tie the new buildings with the classic Cullum Memorial Hall and the Officers’ Mess. Its color is darker than the pink granite of Cullum Hall, to approach more closely the dark brown of the Library and the gray of the Academic, while its flat buttresses harmonize with the straight lines of Memorial Hall.
Photo White Studio
“Spooning” on Flirtation Walk
In this building there are forty suites of three rooms and a bath each, besides rooms in the basement for the janitor and for officers’ servants.
Adjoining the Bachelor Officers’ quarters is the beautiful Cullum Memorial Hall, built of Milford pink marble and resembling somewhat in style, the Erechtheum, on the Acropolis at Athens. Just under the cornice and above the four Ionic columns is carved: “To the Officers and Graduates of the Military Academy.” To the left of the main hall is a small assembly room, whose walls contain bronze tablets to graduates who have been killed in action. The flags are guidons, carried by our Cavalry, both regular and volunteer, during our wars, chiefly during the Spanish War.
In the lower halls are tablets to Superintendents and to the deceased Professors of the Academy, besides fitting bronze memorial shields, recounting the battles of the Civil War in which graduates of the Academy participated.
Bronze trophy cannon are freely used in the adornment of the walls, both in the lower hall and in the hall on the second floor. They are chiefly Mexican and Confederate trophies, but a few were captured from the British at Stony Point (south of West Point) in July, 1779.
Among the most interesting perhaps of the cannon are the two large bronze ones in front of the main entrance. Both were made at Douay, France, in 1755, under the supervision of J. Béranger, royal commissioner of foundaries. The one on the right (as one enters the building) is inscribed “Le Fâcheux,” and the one on the left “Le Conquérant.” Both were taken from the Punta Blanca Battery in the harbor of Santiago de Cuba. These cannon are almost the exact duplicate of the five cannon at the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, Md., and very similar to two cannon at the Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Va. The latter guns, cast about eighty years before the others, are part of several cannon purchased from France by Virginia in 1778 for use in the Revolutionary War. It is surprising that the Spanish should have been using them in Cuba, since the Spaniards manufactured guns of equally high quality.
The four inverted bronze mortars that surmount the corners of the piazza were made, two at Sevilla and two at Barcelona, in Spain, and were surrendered by the Mexicans to the American forces, April 22, 1847. These mortars were known as stone mortars, and they were employed in siege operations to precipitate large masses of stone upon the heads of the enemy in the advanced trenches, or in like manner to clear the trench of its defenders preparatory to an assault.