Packer Chapel (Packer Memorial Church)

After the death of Asa Packer in 1879, his daughter Mary Packer Cummings gave the university a chapel in his name. A High Victorian Gothic design by Quaker architect Hutton, it is built of gray rubble with yellow sandstone trim, has a Latin cross plan with heavily buttressed transepts, polygonal apse, and a tough corner tower rising to a stone spire. The chapel was initially consecrated as an Episcopal church, but as the town's Episcopal Cathedral Church of the Holy Nativity ( NO36) was nearby in Fountain Hill, it was changed to a nondenominational chapel. At the time of its construction, the university's chaplain, the Reverend Elwood Worcester, praised it as “one of the most beautiful collegiate churches in America … in spite of its windows,” adding that “poor stained-glass windows have done more harm to true religion in America than all our atheists.” The windows were replaced in 1909. The chapel itself has recently undergone a comprehensive (and award-winning) restoration that included chipping out all masonry joints and re-mortaring, re-leading, and setting the stained glass windows, and rebuilding deteriorated soft stone ornament.