Davis Hall - Phillips Exeter Academy

A new classic

Once the Academy's library, then a student center and dance studio, our stately Davis Hall has begun a new era as the home to our Department of Classical Languages.

Generation next

Everything old is new again, or so they say, an adage particularly useful for a school soon to celebrate its 250th birthday. The expression aptly fits in the case of the venerable Davis Hall, which has a renewed purpose in its second century: Home to our Classical Languages Department.

A year-long renovation, completed in 2025, culminated with four classrooms on the first floor for our Latin and Greek scholars and two common spaces on the second floor that will serve the entire Academy community. The Classics Department for years shared space in the Academy Building with math, history, religion and other departments. As the Academy Building’s own renovations got underway, Classics moved into a dedicated space.

Old space, new purpose

The 14,000 square-foot building features two levels: A ground floor to house new classrooms and faculty space for the Classics Department; and a second floor to be used by every Exonian.

Building on history

Davis Library opened in 1912. It is named for Benjamin P. Davis, a member of the class of 1863 who bequeathed $50,000 to the school to fund a library. For 60 years, the building served as intended before the Academy’s needs outgrew it and the much larger Class of 1945 Library opened next door in 1971.

The space soon found a second life as the Davis Student Center, home to The Exonian, WPEA and clubs of every order. When the old Thompson Science Building was renovated in 2005 to become what today is the Elizabeth Phillips Academy Center, Davis was available again.

Admissions’ financial aid operations moved into the first floor, and in 2009, the former reading room on the second floor was converted into a dance studio. The dancers moved out in 2018 with the opening of The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Theater and Dance.

Community space

Before renovation began, campus planners saw an opportunity to introduce Davis to a new generation of Exonians who had never set foot in the building. Two important pieces of the blueprints can be found upstairs: The wonderful Mary Amen Room and the library’s original grand reading room.

The Amen Room was left largely intact. The book-lined study combines neoclassical beauty with a Harkness table to hold classes, seminars, club meetings and quiet study.

The grand reading room has been restored to its original grandeur and is now one of the premier student gathering and event spaces on campus, complete with new furnishings, acoustic treatment, restored finishes and perimeter display cases designed to showcase highlights of the Academy community. The room was dedicated in fall 2025 as the Mary Homeier Rawson Reading Room. Principal Bill Rawson ’71; P’08 made the room possible in his capacity as an alumni donor. His late wife Mary passed away shortly before he returned to campus to serve as the school’s principal in 2018.

Principal Rawson envisions the room “to be a place of relatively quiet repose, where students can come and go during the academic day to read, study, do homework, or engage in other quiet activities, and where faculty might come and go during free periods for similar purposes.”