Changing Chapel

Mrs. Samuel Holden was shocked when she learned that Harvard had no place of worship; so shocked that she withdrew $400 from the Bank of England and donated it for a building "promoting the true religion: Sobriety, Righteousness, and Godliness." Completed in 1744, Holden Chapel still stands in the northwest corner of the Yard displaying the Holden coat of arms.

Time has obscured both the shield's motto, "Tenco et Tencor" (I hold and I am Holden), and the building's original purpose. Holden remained a chapel for scarcely two decades before becoming the home of the Provincial House of Representatives which had fled from British troops in Boston. A further insult to the British benefactress was the building's transformation into a barrack for 160 Revolutionary soldiers. In 1779, after the infantry had departed, the faculty voted that "The college Engines and Buckets be immediately repaired and plac'd in Holden Chapel." The small building became the College's student-run fire department. For the next 40 years undergraduates watched buildings burn, sprayed professors' homes, and took nightly rides through the Square "to exercise the engine." But the brigade's escapades ended when the College established a medical department.

Holden was the cradle of the Harvard Medical School. The College thus became a University, the chapel's first floor a laboratory (probably the nation's first) and the basement a storehouse for cadavers. When the Med school moved to Boston the bodies were raised to the first floor as a display. The dead left and the living entered Holden, now a dormitory, but not before human skulls and crossbones decorated many students' rooms.

Yet the new inhabitants did less damage to the building than did the chemistry teacher who preceded them. In the 1830's Dr. John Webster, hiding behind a door while he stretched a pole with a candle at its end toward a kettle, would ignite "a volcano in an iron pot." In 1837 the pot exploded, smoke billowed forth, and his students threw themselves out of the windows.

Residents left Holden permanently by mid-century, moving to the newer and larger dormitories. For the next fifty years the building played host to carpenters, clubs, choirs, lecturers, and the dramatic society. But when World War I began, Holden changed from a half-empty storehouse to the busy center for the Student Army Training Corps. In the last war it was a distribution depot for naval supplies.

The Glee Club entered in 1951 to find that the chapel, now but one large room, was so bare and lofty that a note would echo between its three-foot walls for seven seconds. A recent demonstration of this phenomenon lasted only four seconds. However, the tenor explained that the furniture and tapestries were the cause of the failure, not his voice. The group now has its business office there. Typewriters and an occasional alumni sing resound in the room which once rang with cannons and court-martial, songs and firebells, actors and legislators, explosions and saws. Such noises would have shocked Mrs. Holden, but in another two centuries the chapel may once again echo sermons.