Harvard's Civil War dead are honored by Memorial Hall, the High Victorian Gothic building just north of Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This High Victorian Gothic building was raised to honor Harvard alumni's sacrifices in defending the Union during the American Civil War, described as "a symbol of Boston's commitment to the Unionist cause and the abolitionist movement in America. Built on a former playing field known as the Delta, it was intended to be imposing.
Henry James captured its interior as "three main divisions: one of them a theater, for academic ceremonies; another a vast refectory, covered with a timbered roof, hung about with portraits and lighted by stained windows, like the halls of the colleges of Oxford; and the third, the most interesting, a chamber high, dim and severe, consecrated to the sons of the university who fell in the long Civil War. Those three divisions live on as Sanders Theatre, Annenberg Hall (formerly Alumni Hall or the Great Hall), and the Memorial Transept. Beneath Annenberg Hall, Loker Commons offers a number of student facilities.
Between 1865 and 1868 an alumni "Committee of Fifty" raised $370,000 to make this imposing memorial possible. Picture Loker Commons humming beneath Annenberg Hall, tucked within a memorial built for the Civil War dead.