For the last 15 years, Montana State University's iconic image has been its cupola atop Montana Hall. Anchored by the solid 19th century bulk of the building, the airy cupola centered on its roof rises as a cultural grace note to institutional seriousness.
But for 80 years, generations passed through the Bozeman campus unaware that something was missing from Montana Hall -- unless, of course, they heard about the cow in the cupola.
According to campus legend, long ago -- some versions say 1906, others in the 1920s -- students coaxed a cow up into the cupola -- or onto the roof platform left after the wind-wracked cupola was removed. As the cow tale goes, the prank may or may not have resulted in the destruction of the first cupola.
Whatever the cause, the MSU campus was without a cupola until 1993. In honor of MSU's Centennial, then-president Michael Malone decided some campus refurbishment was in order. Garfield Street was transformed into the Centennial Mall and a cupola was reinstalled.
The new cupola is different from the original 1898 stick-built structure that began to list in the wind as early as 1910, according to Robert Lashaway, director of MSU Facilities Services.
"Apparently in 1914, the upper cupola housing and spire were removed to prevent complete failure, leaving the lower platform with its surrounding railing," Lashaway says.
Working with MSU engineering professor emeritus Fred Videon, Cecilia Vaniman -- then serving as campus architect -- designed the replacement cupola. Vaniman credits Videon with ensuring that the cupola will stay up on top of the building.
Vaniman's biggest challenge came in duplicating the ornamental details of the original cupola.
"It had large, spherical brass or copper finials at each corner," she explains. "We couldn't find anything that large, and it would have been extremely costly to have them fabricated."
Then a plumber acquaintance told her about some huge brass toilet floats that had just been removed from a local elementary school.
"They were perfect," Vaniman says. "Over the years they've developed just the right patina."
The new cupola was constructed by campus carpenters but getting it onto the towering building involved bringing in a special crane from Billings.
But what about the cow? Asked for evidence that the prank occurred, people cite Merrill Burlingame, the late MSU historian. In Burlingame's 1968 book on MSU's history, there is this single sentence:
"Another time, a cow appeared to have wandered alone and unaided up the switchback stairs to the fourth floor of Old Main, then up the narrow stairs to the little cupola which for years ornamented the top of the building."
Does Burlingame slyly reference students who professed no knowledge of how the cow reached its precarious perch? Or is he honoring the legend while rejecting it as history?
The way Lashaway heard it, "A group of students took a calf up to the platform and tied it to the rail--President Atkinson then ordered the removal of the rest of the structure. We did find a pencil note on some of the framing that closed the hole, noting it was done in the late '20s. No reason was memorialized."
Is it possible it never really happened?
"I don't know of a college that hasn't got that story," said Pierce Mullen, MSU professor emeritus who co-authored the exhaustive MSU history, In the People's Interest. "It's ubiquitous. You might be able to persuade the cow to go up the stairs, but how would you get it back down?"
One version of the story holds that because the cow couldn't get down the stairs, it had to be killed and brought down in parts.
"That building was originally the whole university," Mullen argues. "There were offices, there were classrooms, and that's where the library was. I don't know that the building was ever unoccupied long enough for someone to get a cow into it."
To test Mullen's ubiquity evaluation, one simply may Google "cow + prank" to be rewarded with 247,000 hits. In the first five pages of hits, there are claims of similar pranks at MIT, Auburn, and in the Thomas Jefferson-designed rotunda atop the University of Virginia's main building. Then there's Neil Steinberg's book, published in 1992 by St. Martin's Press -- If At All Possible, Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks.
The legend of the prank is so durable that homage is paid to it in the modern cupola.
"MSU carpenters mounted a small plastic cow in a high-up, difficult to access part of the cupola to commemorate the cow legend, next to a small plaque noting the names of those who worked on the replica cupola," Lashaway says. "I've seen this cow personally."
MSU history professor Robert Rydell, another co-author of In the People's Interest, gets the last word.
"We just don't know for sure," Rydell writes. "But it is a story worth milking for all it's worth."