Courtesy of the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives

Massachusetts Hall, the oldest building on Bowdoin’s campus, has a long and storied history full of renovations and evolving purposes. The 223-year old building was named after the state of Massachusetts, of which Maine was a part of until it became its own state as part of the Missouri Compromise in 1820.

There were a number of challenges during Massachusetts Hall’s building. In her book, “The Architecture of Bowdoin College,” historian Patricia McGraw Anderson describes modifications to the building’s size due to economic constraints as a setback to its construction. As a result, the building ended up half as long and a story lower than the original plans indicated.

Importing the materials to build the hall also delayed construction. In his article, “Whispering Pines: One Hearth, Many Lives,” Secretary of Development and College Relations John Cross ’76 described the transportation and expenses of construction materials.

“Bricks made in Portland were offloaded at New Meadows and were brought by wagon across the blueberry plains of East Brunswick,” Cross wrote. “According to the account book of Trustee Charles Coffin, workers were paid in West Indian rum for their labor. One expense item was a pound of gunpowder to set off an explosion to celebrate the completion of the roof.”

Despite the delays, Massachusetts Hall was still the only College building when Overseer of the College Captain John Dunlap and housewright brothers Samuel Melcher III and Aaron Melcher finished erecting the building in 1802.

“Until President McKeen’s house was completed in 1803, Massachusetts Hall contained the entire College—President McKeen and his family, the eight students of the Class of 1806, a kitchen and pantry and a recital chamber/chapel,” Cross wrote.

Massachusetts Hall has been used as a space to teach a variety of disciplines while also holding a number of artifacts from Bowdoin’s history. Massachusetts Hall began as a space for the sciences, including the “Cleveland Cabinet”—Professor Parker Cleaveland’s mineral and natural history collections—which stayed in a cupola until 1894, as well as the Medical School of Maine from 1820 to 1861. The Cabinet is now housed in Bowdoin’s Special Collections and Archives, and the cupola was removed for safety concerns.

Massachusetts Hall later became a general space for classrooms, including philosophy, religion and English classes. As the College grew, the space became solely an English building. Professor of the English Language and Literature and Cinema Studies Aviva Briefel, who has taught in the building since 2000, highlighted both its literary history and the memories of more recent alumni.

“There is the history with a big H—Hawthorne and Longfellow—but also the history of all the students who have learned there over the years,” Briefel wrote in an email to the Orient. “The space hasn’t changed that much since I’ve been here, with the exception of renovations to the seminar rooms…. I think that’s why so many alums come back to the building during reunions—they can find so much of their own history there.”

Cross also highlighted the hearths in the first- and third-floor classrooms as remnants of the old McKeen kitchen.

“Students … who meet for a seminar in the old McKeen kitchen on the first floor can see in the fireplace the iron pots that were among the scientific equipment given to Professor Parker Cleaveland by English chemist Sir Humphrey Davy. In Massachusetts Hall, we have, in a figurative sense, the hearth from which the ever-evolving experiment that is Bowdoin College began,” Cross wrote.

Massachusetts Hall’s third floor space has also become home to Bowdoin’s oldest student organization, the Peucinian Society. According to Aidan Sheeran-Hahnel ’26, the president of the club, Peucinian moved to Massachusetts Hall from Sills Hall around 2011 due to size constraints and now meets there every Thursday night for its weekly disputations.

Sheeran-Hahnel stated that because the building was the home of the Peucinian Society’s library in the 1800’s, its return fit the building’s history.

“[Massachusetts Hall] is our oldest building on campus, and, in some ways, the Quad is partially designed around it,” Sheeran-Hahnel said. “The history of the Peucinian Society in relation to the history of the College is something that’s an incredible source of inspiration.… Having [Peucinian Society] in Mass Hall is really just a perennial reminder that you’re connected to some sort of tradition of Bowdoin College that is much larger than you.”