About the "Hill Builder"	President's Home
Cherry Hall	Perry Snell Hall
Health Building-Gymnasium	Stadium
Heating Plant	Van Meter Hall
West Hall	Manual Arts Building
Gordon Wilson Hall	Kentucky Building

About the "Hill Builder"

Born in 1862 in Natchez, Mississippi, Davis was the son of a self-taught architect. After attending school in Boston, he held several internships before setting up a practice in Paducah, Kentucky in 1892. With an established reputation, he moved to Louisville in 1902, where he remained until his death fifty years later. His successful practice included commissions for a number of Louisville landmarks, including the Jefferson County Armory (now the Louisville Gardens), the Inter-Southern Building (Kentucky Home Mutual Building), the Watterson and Kentucky Hotels, and the interior remodeling of the Jefferson County Courthouse.

How Western's president, Henry H. Cherry, and Davis met is unclear, but it may have occurred when Davis was in Bowling Green supervising the construction of the new city hall in 1907. The college hired Davis as school architect in 1908. Davis and Henry Wright, a landscape architect from St. Louis's George Kessler Company, met and walked Western's new property atop Vinegar Hill.

Davis's first assignment for Western included submitting rough sketches for 12 buildings to Wright, who supervised the drafting of the school's first master plan. The plan called for an unusual circular arrangement of structures around the hill. This arrangement allowed each campus building to dominate its spatial section of the hill's perimeter.

Davis's first building on the hill was the Administration Building (now Van Meter) and his last was Cherry Hall. Surely there was no greater way to begin or end an architectural career on the hill. Given the opportunity to design not one building, but a "city in microcosm" at Western, Davis left an indelible signature; he became the "Hill Builder." In the early 1980s, Davis' Western buildings were placed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Brinton B. Davis Thematic Scheme, recognizing his contribution to the development of the hilltop campus. The National Register recognizes buildings of historic, architectural, and cultural significance.