Answer Richmond: What Is Up With the Meditation Hut?
Richmond Joyce | March 3, 2026
Inspired by the Asheville Watchdog’s “Answer Man” column, Echo writer and photographer Richmond Joyce is here to answer all your historical queries.
Hidden away on the Jensen Trail that runs between Facilities and the Holden Arts buildings is a stone hut with wooden supports and 25 years of history. If you spend too much time with your eyes on the roots that braid over the pathway or the trickling stream that runs beside it, you might just walk by it and never notice. It fits perfectly and carefully into the incline it is nested on.
This structure, off in the middle of the woods, is the Meditation Hut. For a quarter of a century now, it has had the pleasure of growing moss and being weathered by the elements of the Swannanoa Valley. As a secluded space in our woods for personal growth, connection and peace, it seems that our forest is the perfect site for such a place. But how did it get built?
The idea of a meditation location on campus was proposed by students and faculty in the fall semester of 1995. At this point in Warren Wilson College (WWC) history, Doug Orr is our college’s president, and it has been 19 years since we were last associated with the Northern Presbyterian National Board of Missions. Globally, the world feels like it is in turmoil. In April, 186 people were killed in what is still the largest act of domestic terrorism in the United States, and by the end of the year, the CDC would report 1995 to be the deadliest year for Americans with AIDS, an epidemic killing upwards of 50,000 people.
With all of this chaos unfolding within the United States, it makes sense for people on campus to want a break from it all. Who doesn't want to disappear into the woods for a little while when the rapidly changing world around you won’t seem to stand still? The draw for such a place through this lens makes just as much sense to a student of WWC in 1995 as it does to a contemporary student, 30 years later.
After deliberation on space, place and materials, a grant was approved in 1996 for the official construction of the Meditation Hut–although the work would not actually start on the site until 1998, when the site was cleared, and footers were hand-dug on the school’s annual Work Day. Further construction would have to wait another year, until Work Day of 1999, when all of the digging required for the site was finished, and students began hauling rocks to the site for use in construction.
An architect named Michael Robinson was commissioned in October of 1999 to create official blueprints for the structure, which are accessible in the Link Archives housed on the bottom floor of the Ellison Library. These maps depict plans which were dutifully followed over the next two years by students until the building as we see it today was completed.
Warren Wilson students have, it seems, always had a green thumb and an eye for upcycling. The interior flooring, along with the log rafters, of the Meditation Hut came from the front of the Elizabeth Williams Chapel, which can be read about here. This beautiful circle of life–from one student-build providing materials to another–should not go unnoticed. While perhaps a romanticist's view, by paying the Meditation Hut a visit and letting your hands sweep over the support beams and exposed log inside, you are rekindling the love and dedication that Asheville Farm School (AFS) boys and WWC students alike have for this campus.
On the approach to the Meditation Hut, there is one adjacent part of the structure that sticks out more than the rest, except for the folding chairs set up on the roof. These would be the ceramic tiles that dedicate the hut to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. This fact may perhaps make readers raise an eyebrow, but it becomes even more peculiar when you realize that Mrs. Roosevelt died in 1962, long before this hut was ever even dreamed of. So why her?
Eleanor Roosevelt was no stranger to Asheville, having visited one of our tributary schools three years earlier in 1942, but her second visit to the city is the one memorialized by the Meditation Hut. In March of 1945, newly born into life as Warren H. Wilson Vocational Junior College, the Swannanoa Valley received the longest serving First Lady once more. According to newspaper sources reflecting on the event, Mrs. Roosevelt got along well with our at-the-time college president, Arthur Bannerman, and even acknowledged him directly in her regular column, “My Day.”
Eleanor Roosevelt would go on to deliver an off-the-cuff speech to the students of Warren Wilson inside the walls of the Elizabeth Williams Chapel, titled “The Challenges of the Future of American Youth.” Did you catch the connection there? Mrs. Roosevelt spoke under the same log beams that would be torn down at the end of the 20th century, which Warren Wilson students would then recycle in order to construct the modern Meditation Hut.
The Meditation Hut, nestled away on a hill behind the Holden Arts buildings, is easy to overlook and take for granted. Today, it is decorated with empty cans of beer, old fabric scraps, chalk graffiti and even a negative pregnancy test–but the structure itself is still proudly held up by the memory of matriarchs like Elizabeth Williams and Eleanor Roosevelt, and countless WWC students who came together to create something new out of the old. This is a call to action to you, Wilsonite; appreciate the history you are provided on this campus, from modern to the mesolithic, and maybe even go meditate at the little stone hut in our woods.
