To a casual visitor Harvard Hall doubtless seems only another agglomeralation of lecture halls, with narrow staircases and ill-lighted rooms that make it appear slightly more grotesque than some of its neighbors. Yet for fifty years this one building was the center of College life in just about every sense of the word--here for the student of seven score years ago were gathered his library, his dining hall, his social center, his museum, his laboratory, his chapel, and his lecture room. But the passage of time has seen the College expand by leaps and bounds, and gradually all but the very last of these functions has been shifted to newer and larger structures.

Harvard Hall's present site was once occupied by one of the most ancient of the College buildings, which also bore the name of the College's first benefactor and namesake. But in the year 1764 a smallpox epidemic broke out in Massachusetts, and a prudent General Court moved to Cambridge to escape the worst of the plague. In the midst of the winter vacation, old Harvard Hall suddenly caught fire, and despite the efforts of a night-shirted Governor and Legislature it burned to the ground, consuming the greater part of the library including all save one of the volumes John Harvard had donated. Feeling partly responsible for the tragedy, the Commonwealth put forth funds to the sum of $23,000 for a new building, and Governor Francis Bernard himself designed it in traditional Georgian style. Thus in 1766 the College's fifth oldest edifice was erected.

The first floor of the new structure was divided into two rooms, with a large central hall and fire-place separating them. The westermost of these was the College chapel, while on the east side a large room was devoted to the College dinning hall or Commons, which had in the basement beneath it a kitchen that was then the largest in New England. On the second story were two more large rooms, one the library, and the other a lecture hall containing the College's "philosophical apparatus," which included such scientific instruments as orreries, telescopes and stuffed birds. In the cupola on the roof was the College bell, brought over from an Italian convent.

Ten years after the building was completed, the College was taken over by soldiers of the Revolution, and Harvard Hall became both a storehouse and the commissary for the entire army in Cambridge. Treatment was none too gentle at the hands of the occupying troops and the building suffered considerable damage chiefly the loss of a thousand pounds of lead from its roof, which the soldiers converted into ammunition for their Revolutionary muzzleloaders.

The end of the war saw Harvard Hall reconverted to its old peacetime uses, but another revolution soon began, known as the "Rotton Cabbage Rebellion." between the students and the food they were being served. Among other incidents, this conflict once found 600 grains of tartar emetic applied to the College's morning coffee (with disastrous results), and a student suspended after he "did publickly in Hall insult the authority of the College by hitting one of the Officers with a potatoe." By 1816 the expanding collection of books and apparatus squeezed out the Commons to the newly-erected University Hall, and the whole second floor became the library, the old chapel downstairs became a recitation room, and the former Commons became a "mineralogical cabinet." But when the Gore Hall library was built, twenty-five years later, these two lower rooms were combined into a single large hall for Commencement dinners, and on the second floor a Physics Laboratory was established.

In 1870, after a period of rapid University expansion, Harvard Hall was radically remodelled into its present peculiar shape. Though the second story went untouched, an extension was tacked onto the southern side of the first floor, destroying the building's old symmetry, the old interior walls were knocked out and partitions were set up to carve out three smaller rooms. A couple of plaster statues were moved into one of these which became known as Harvard 1, but practically all of Harvard Hall's past glory had moved elsewhere, leaving only memories and five musty old classrooms.