All-Purpose Chapel

A one-time museum, court house, army barracks, navy storehouse, lumber room and fire house, Holden Chapel, the Glee Club's present home, has hardly filled its donors wish: to promote "true Religion, I mean Sobriety, Righteousness and Godliness." For over a century, Harvard students had worshipped in private, until 1744 when Samuel Holden left 400 pounds "to build a Chapple for the use of ye College." But after just twenty years, services moved to Harvard Hall and Holden began its secular marathon.

First to move in was the Massachusetts Legislature. In 1769, when British troops landed in Boston, terrified colonial statesmen petitioned the College for a meeting place across the Charles. Since Holden was empty, it was selected. In the years that followed, students packed the galleries to learn James Otis' lesson in revolution; and when revolution came, Holden again played its part. Colonial troops flooded into Cambridge, 160 of them squeezing into the tiny Chapel. When they finally rolled out, Holden was almost unfit for use.

After a short stint as a lumber shed, it housed the local fire engine, bought just after Harvard Hall burned to the ground. The Faculty voted, in 1779, "that Kendal be directed to see that the College Engine and Bucketts be immediately repaired and plac'd in Holden Chapel." Undergraduate Kendal set to work and organized the Engine Society "for exercising the Engine." And for over forty years, the Engine Society watched all major blazes, invariably doing more harm than good.

In the early eighteen hundreds, College officials tried to salvage the Chapel. They divided it into two stories, put in skylights and enlarged the windows, but for the next fifty years, Holden rated nothing better than the smells of science. At one time it held the Medical School, the physics department and a chemistry laboratory, each science department adding its characteristic flavor. During one Chemistry lecture, "a mass of disagreeable smoke filled the building and the class threw themselves out of the windows." The Medical School specialized in corpses, and visitors to the College were always impressed by the rather gory displays.

Gradually, the science departments escaped to more spacious quarters, and Holden became a medical museum. But the collection of skeletons was far too tempting and the building too easily plundered. Midnight raids and subsequent wall displays of skulls and thigh bones became a mid-century tradition. The notorious Med. Fac. has been traced back to these raids. This addition to undergraduate nihilism rounded out Holden's nineteenth century innovations.

At the end of the century, Holden Chapel started its second childhood. The University tore out all partitions and the second floor, leaving it much like the Chapel of 1744. Newly painted and stylish, Holden became a favorite club room. Its only flaw was an echo which muffled even the clearest lecture. Public speaking courses, however, turned echo to asset as students practiced under the worst possible conditions. But today, Holden has found congenial tenants. As home for the Glee Club, its resonant walls and battered floor perfectly contain both song and beer.