Beaumont Tower stands where the first ag classroom in America once did

If you stand at the foot of the brick tower in the middle of the Michigan State campus and the bells start up overhead, you’re standing on the footprint of College Hall — the first building in the United States put up to teach scientific agriculture. It went up in 1856, the year classes began, and for decades it was the whole point of the place: a farm school proving you could study soil and crops the way other people studied Latin.

College Hall didn’t last. The building’s walls began to fail, and in 1918 it collapsed. Alumni rallied around the spot with a “Save the Circle” campaign, and a Detroit graduate named John W. Beaumont offered to pay for a memorial tower to mark where the old hall had stood. Beaumont Tower opened in 1928, a square Collegiate Gothic shaft with a clock and a set of bells inside.

Those bells are the part people come for. The carillon started as ten bells cast in 1928 by Gillett & Johnston of Croydon, England; more were added over the years, and today there are 49, enough to play the full range of carillon music. A carillonneur sits at a wooden keyboard and plays them by hand, fists and feet, and the sound rolls out across the lawns at noon and on warm evenings.

There’s a campus legend tied to the tower, too — that a couple isn’t truly a couple until they’ve kissed in its shadow, and that a student becomes a “real” Spartan the same way. None of that is in any handbook, of course. But you’ll see people doing it anyway, under all those bells, on the patch of grass where the whole university started.