Whose House? Building Names at Georgia Southern: Carruth Building

Dr. Joseph Enoch Carruth was a professor at Georgia Teachers College for which the Georgia Southern Carruth Building is named after. Dr. Carruth was known at the university as Dr. Joe and was the director of the laboratory school (a children's school that was owned and operated by the college) in the 30s. He hailed from McComb, Mississippi and against the odds gained an education in the rural city, going as far as to gain a doctorate in teaching. During his college years, he went to school at Millsap University alongside another notable college name Dr. Marvin Pitman. He taught at a university in Texas before coming to Georgia and teaching at the college from 1928 - 1947. He then retired back to his hometown in Mississippi and passed the day after Christmas in 1955. In his retirement piece in the GeorgeAnne, he was regaled as an inspiration to many rising teachers in the Georgia Teachers College.

The Carruth Building was built in 1959 and re-purposed in 2015 to serve as Georgia Southern’s Engineering Research Center. It currently comprises several labs and classrooms, including Georgia’s first Asphalt Research Lab, the Nanomaterials Research Lab and the GS Robotics Lab. The Asphalt Research Lab, under the direction of Dr. Junan Shen, features “superpavement” asphalt mixture design equipment, SHRP asphalt binder grade equipment, an asphalt mixture performance tester and weathering equipment.
From: https://cec.georgiasouthern.edu/about/cec-facilities/
 

Georgia Southern University, "The George-Anne" (1947). The George-Anne. 2357.

Ancestry. (n.d.). Joseph Enoch Carruth. Ancestry.com. Retrieved April 27, 2022, 

"Bulloch Herald" (1956). Bulloch County Newspapers (Single Issues). 3683.

Joyner, Rhoda Beth Nicholson, "The Spirit of Pittman: An Ethnography of the Laboratory School on the Site of Georgia Southern University, 1920s--1990s" (2001). Legacy ETDs. 135.