Word: chapels
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...first floor dining room was not always the setting for affronts to authority. Students also were drawn to the tower containing the bell which tolled for rising, classes, and chapel services. Souls seeking revenge assaulted the bell with gunpowder, froze it with water, and stole its tongue. Police pursued one assailant, Joseph McKean, who raced down the slanted roof and leaped, four stories above the ground, to the roof of Hollis. Never caught, he later became a Boylston Professor of Rhetoric...
...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...
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...
...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...