Gothic Revival on a grand scale, the Trinity College Chapel in Hartford was completed in 1932 on the campus of Trinity College. Warmly conceived and grand in scale, it was designed by Philip H. Frohman of the firm Frohman, Robb and Little, who also designed the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The chapel was a gift from Cleveland industrialist William Gwinn Mather, a Trinity graduate of 1877; his $500,000 donation was announced at the college board's winter meeting on December 2, 1927, and is noted as equivalent to $7,245,000 in 2024. Frohman was hired in the summer of 1928, and ground was broken here on February 1, 1930.
Shortly before construction began, college administrators discovered a crate of stones a Trinity alumnus had donated in the early 1880s; those fragments were worked into the new chapel. As you stand here, know that the fabric of this building includes dramatic heirlooms: framework and mullions of a window from the Palace of Whitehall, a corbel from Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, and a piece of Roman tile from the Chapel of St. Pancras and a piece of Caen stone from St. Ethelbert's Tower at the Abbey. Find a window frame from the Palace of Whitehall and a corbel from Cambridge's Trinity College worked into these walls.