Scattered across Towson University, on the brick sides of the oldest buildings on campus, weathered yellow and black signs are reminders of a long-ago threat.
The signs say "nuclear fallout shelter." They were put up decades ago to point students and staff to underground bunkers.
In the 1950s and 1960s, tens of thousands of fallout shelters were established across the country to provide possible protection in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. It may seem unthinkable now, but during the Cold War, people would have rushed into a dimly-lit utility tunnel under the old side of campus.
The tunnel still exists today. On a recent tour, Harry Hughes, the director of the physical plant at Towson, pointed to evidence of its potential use as a shelter.
"Let's see, here we are - 'fallout shelter,'" Hughes said, reading the words on a rusty sign in a corner of the tunnel. "This is where you would have stayed in the event of fallout."
According to the sign, the space had a capacity of 100 people. But it's hard to imagine fitting more than a few dozen in the corridor now. The tunnel has been filled with large pipes for steam, water, natural gas, and high-speed Internet connections, making it barely wide enough to walk through.
But back then, "you had space for people to sit or lay," Hughes said.
Hughes doesn't know how old the tunnel was. He hasn't been able to find any documentation of its construction.
It starts at an entrance in the Power Plant and burrows under Newell Dining Hall. Then it takes an abrupt right turn under Newell and Richmond Halls, then snakes uphill to Stephens Hall. The tunnel has several subsections that traverse in different directions underneath the buildings.
During the Cold War, cardboard barrels with water, blankets, and other survival supplies were stored in the tunnel.
A second, more spacious fallout shelter was located in the basement of Stephens Hall. A stairway on the first floor leads to a windowless basement room, now used for technical equipment. It also connects to the tunnel.
Signs on the sides of the Media Center and Prettyman Hall suggest that there were fallout shelters in those buildings, too. They were probably located in the basement.
"I'm going to guess they were the ones without windows," Hughes said.
He recently noticed some remnants of the civil defense program in a storage space under Prettyman.
"They had some old large cans… probably two feet by one foot by one foot, and they probably weighed about 50 pounds a piece, of old soda crackers and hard candies. They were civil defense supplies," he said. "There was some old medicine up there years ago too, like old bottles of aspirin and tetracycline and stuff like that."
The canisters of water, food, blankets, and medicine have been disposed of. Now, the only remaining signs of fallout fear are affixed to the sides of Towson's buildings.
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