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As a key USC administrator from 1963 until his retirement in 1983, Hal Brunton presided over the most explosive period of campus growth in USC Columbia's history.
Brunton, the dean of administration and later vice president of business affairs, helped acquire 233 properties that increased the campus from 108 to 240 acres and oversaw the addition of 53 buildings totaling five million square feet of space.
Of all the projects he supervised, the one closest to his heart was the restoration of the Horseshoe, an exhaustive 10-year project that began in 1972. That historic undertaking is now documented in a just-published 100-page memoir by Brunton entitled Renovation and Restoration of the Horseshoe, A Memoir by Hal Brunton and published by Caroline McKissick Dial Foundation of the South Caroliniana Library.
The book, edited by Nancy H. Washington, University Libraries, and designed by Mary Arnold Garvin, formerly of University Publications, contains more than 50 illustrations, many of them previously unpublished.
The Horseshoe restoration was completely different from Brunton's other projects with the University because it dealt with saving old buildings rather than building new ones, he said.
"When we started the project, restoration wasn't on anybody's priority list," Brunton said. "We had to sneak it in, and as the book shows, the start of the work was almost purely accidental. Everything else we did later on was purposeful, but the start of it sort of fell into place by chance. Then people started getting widely enthusiastic about it."
01/03
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