With a strategic plan that calls for four new buildings over the next 10 years, all of them across Mayflower Hill Drive from the academic quadrangle and Mary Low Commons, Colby will start literally laying the groundwork in September for the most ambitious campus expansion since the move to Mayflower Hill more than a half-century ago.

After more than three years of planning on paper and in meetings, College officials are ready to roll out the heavy equipment to break ground for a whole new area on campus - the Colby Green. In April the Board of Trustees approved spending $6.2 million for earthmoving, landscaping, underground utility service and storm-water management systems to support the new buildings. This is the first in a series of sequential projects, according to Vice President for Administration W. Arnold Yasinski.

Necessary permits are expected in time for earthmoving to begin in September to build the Colby Green, an elliptical lawn directly across the road from Miller Library's terraces, Yasinski said. The green, modeled on a traditional New England town common, eventually will anchor four buildings: the existing Lunder House (admissions); an alumni and development center that will house administrative offices and space for College and alumni functions; and two new academic buildings, one for the natural sciences and the other for social sciences and interdisciplinary programs.

Perspective from Mayflower Hill Drive.

New buildings will address needs identified in the Strategic Plan for Colby. Groundbreaking for the alumni center is slated for the spring of 2004; the social sciences/interdisciplinary building will be next. In addition to the buildings on the Colby Green, a music instruction and performance center is envisioned facing the Runnals Building.

Landscaping and earthwork to build the Colby Green accounts for about $2 million of the $6.2 million approved for phase one of the campus expansion plans. Cut-and-fill grading will build a terrace down from the roadway to shape the elliptical green in the field between Lunder House and the Alfond-Wales Tennis Courts. To build Colby Green, an estimated 60,000 cubic yards of soil will be moved, about half of it to be trucked in, Yasinski said. Landscapers will raise the back edge of the field so the landscape will no longer fall away toward the east. The view over the Kennebec Valley and the Dixmont Hills will remain open.