HALLS OF NAME
A PLACE TO PRAY
When its reddish hue, low roof and off-center, eight-sided bell tower debuted in 1885 just a few steps from the row of balanced white buildings that include Dartmouth Hall, Rollins Chapel might have been the architectural equivalent of a punk-rock guitar chord at a chamber-music concert: jarring. Yet the granite-and-sandstone building on the Green's northeast corner quickly became one of the College's most iconic structures.
Its benefactor, Edward Ashton Rollins of Wakefield, New Hampshire, class of 1851, earned a Harvard law degree, then was speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives. Later President Abraham Lincoln tapped him to become commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, which was established in 1862 to raise Civil War cash. Later still, according to Rollins' son, the deed for Alaska was
signed on Rollins' Washington desk, which had belonged to Daniel Webster, class of 1801, when Webster was secretary of state.
Rollins paid $31,944.60 for the building designed by Boston's John Lyman Faxon. "It is a little more adorned, elaborate and expensive than what was contemplated," Rollins wrote to a friend. "But why should we live in ceiled houses and the house of the Lord lie in waste?" Most of the six stained-glass windows commissioned by Rollins, a devout Presbyterian, likened past College presidents to apostles and saints.
While frail health kept the 57-year-old Rollins from the June ribbon-cutting, he did make it inside a few months later, five days prior to his death.
Popular as it was, the chapel was expanded in 1903, 1908 and 1912, nearly doubling its capacity.
