"The spot where it stands," President Benjamin Ide Wheeler observed upon the completion of Senior Hall in 1906, "will be another beautiful nook on the college grounds." A century later the rustic log cabin, nestled alongside Strawberry Creek between the two faculty clubs, remains a picturesque and revered part of campus heritage. Embodying the precept of student self-government, it was built by the Order of the Golden Bear honor society and still serves -- resolutely at times -- as a forum for shaping University opinion.

The Order was established in March 1900. Senior men -- expected to positively influence student life -- as well as University officers, faculty, and alumni filled its early roster. Today the co-ed, student-led Order maintains a tradition of freely discussing campus issues.

In 1904 the Regents accepted the Order's offer to construct the hall as a gathering place for men of the senior class. Joining the cause, supervising architect John Galen Howard prepared the plans without a fee. Regent Phoebe Apperson Hearst -- who had previously donated Hearst Hall as a women's social center -- provided $1,000, about one-fifth the cost for the men's facility, the balance coming from fellows, alumni, and contributed services.

Howard designed a rectangular log cabin approximately 30 feet by 80 feet, comprising five 16-foot structural bays. A large four-bay front room would accommodate the men's popular Senior Singing. Back-to-back clinker-brick fireplaces were centered in a log partition featuring a concealed door to the Order's rear one-bay meeting room. Forming the long gable roof, notched log trusses were supported by log pilasters between bands of high casement windows. Howard knew log construction, as did Berkeley contractors Kidder and McCullough -- builders of the Faculty Club in 1902 -- who did the carpentry work for a small cost.

The plans called for 180 unstripped redwood logs, ranging from 8 to 20 inches in diameter and 8 to 35 feet in length. They were found in second-growth redwood growing tall, straight, and slender from the stumps of virgin trees along the Russian River near Guer-neville. Meanwhile, the hall's foundations were laid and hearthstone dedicated in October 1905.

By late fall the 120-ton load of logs was ready, requiring 10 rail cars. It helped that Fellow and Regent Arthur Foster was President of the California Northwestern Railway Company, which hauled the logs at no cost from Guerneville to the Sonoma County junction of Schellville. There the logs were transferred to Southern Pacific for shipment to Berkeley at a nominal charge of $30.05.

The logs arrived on campus in December. Inscribed fireplace cornerstones were completed the same month, and construction followed a break in the weather. Rustic furnishings -- massive log-hewn chairs, benches and tables, hanging bearskins, mounted antlers, heavy andirons -- complemented the lodgelike interior.

Dedication was planned for Commencement Week in May 1906, but the San Francisco earthquake struck weeks before, causing the ceremony to be postponed until fall. In August the Order first convened in the hall, which the following month was ceremoniously transferred to the seniors.

House rules, reflecting the times, banned underclassmen, women, card playing, and liquor, and decreed that "the first man caught carving his initials ought to be thrown out bodily." Members underwrote cleaning, floor varnishing, firewood, tobacco for faculty-led "smokers," and a new "open house" tradition of entertaining Stanford seniors on Big Game Day.

The Order soon outgrew its meeting room. Regent Foster took note and donated additional logs, extending the building eastward by one bay in 1914, bringing it to its present size.

In 1923 student government functions transferred to newly-built Stephens Memorial Union (now Stephens Hall), but the Order continued meeting in the cabin until 1973, when it was declared seismically unsafe and converted into a storage facility. That same year it was designated to be demolished to permit expansion of the Faculty Club. In protest, "Friends of the Campus for Senior Hall," a group of students, faculty, and city and preservation leaders, rallied support, persuading the University to cancel the project. Saved at the eleventh hour, the hall was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, cited as "a prime example of a type of lumber construction at one time common and now almost extinct."

Interim alterations in 1985 made the hall useable again. And today the Order is planning a more extensive restoration, while considering functions for the main room, now used occasionally for student groups, classes, and events. Renovation also will ensure continued use of the Golden Bear Room, that inner sanctum of University tradition, discourse, and student leadership.

A former Berkeley campus planner, Harvey Helfand '66 is the author and photographer of The Campus Guide: University of California Berkeley, the authoritative guidebook to Cal's 133-year-old campus.