Mills Godwin Life Sciences Building (MGB)
The Mills Godwin Life Sciences Building, or familiarly MGB, is home to the Department of Biological Sciences, the Department of Psychology, classrooms, and laboratory space. The building is located west of the Patricia W. and J. Douglas Perry Library and next to the Pretlow Planetarium on the Old Dominion University (ODU) campus.
Contents
History
The Mills Godwin Life Sciences Building was built on land that once occupied the J.J. Smallwood School, an African American school in the Lambert’s Point neighborhood of Norfolk. The school was named after John Jasper Smallwood, a local civil rights leader and education advocate, and operated from 1920 to 1970. ODU purchased the property from the City of Norfolk, and demolished the school as part of constructing the building. Opened in January of 1981, the building is named in honor of Mills Godwin, a student at the Norfolk Division of the College of William & Mary and the only two-term Governor of Virginia. Governor Godwin was instrumental in granting ODU funding for several capital projects in the 1960s and 1970s. Prior to 1981, the Department of Biology was housed in the Science Building, now William B. Spong, Jr. Hall, or Spong Hall, and the Department of Psychology had offices off 49th Street.
Resources
- Old Dominion University Photographic and Multimedia Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, Perry Library, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, 23529.
- ODU Photographic Collection, Old Dominion University Libraries Digital Collections, Old Dominion University Libraries.
- Building the University, Old Dominion University Libraries Digital Exhibit, 2005.
References
- Bookman, Steven and Jessica Ritchie. Old Dominion University: A Campus History Series. Arcadia Publishing. Charleston, South Carolina, 2017.