The first residence for women on the Occidental College campus, Bertha Harton Orr Hall, built in 1925 to house sixty-five women, was a gift of William Meade Orr, an Occidental trustee, in memory of his wife. In 1984 when the residence was converted into the Weingart Center for the Liberal Arts, Erdman Hall, built in 1927 to house seventy women, became the oldest residence hall on the campus.

Grace Carter Erdman, a native of Honolulu, was the daughter of Charles Carter, a member of the Hawaii annexation commission to the United States. Her grandfather, Henry A. P. Carter, was Hawaiian minister to the United States, and a negotiator of several treaties with foreign governments. Her great-grandfather, Dr. Garrett P. Judd, in 1828 went to Hawaii as the first medical missionary in the islands.

In her girlhood Grace Carter lived for a time in Albany, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey. When in the East she met C. Pardee Erdman, then a World War I pilot, whom she married in 1919, later becoming a resident of Pasadena, California, when her husband joined the Occidental faculty in 1922 as professor of religious education. She died in 1925 at the age of thirty-two.

C. Pardee Erdman, the son of Dr. Charles R. Erdman, a Princeton Theological Seminary professor and Mrs. Erdman, the former Estelle Pardee, graduated from Princeton University in 1915. With a Bachelor of Sacred Theology degree from Princeton Theological Seminary he was ordained a Presbyterian minister. He was a member of the Occidental faculty in religion until 1946 except for a leave during World War II as a chaplain in the United States Naval Reserve.

Major donors to Grace Carter Erdman Hall were Professor Erdman, Mrs. Charles R. Erdman, and Mrs. Calvin Pardee of Gennantown, Pennsylvania, widow of a president of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company.

By Jean Paule