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The smallest building in this section is the oldest story in it. The Log Chapel on the shore of St. Mary's Lake is a one-room log cabin-chapel with an attic, and everything that has ever stood on the campus began in it or beside it. Its whole course is three buildings long: a mission chapel, a ruin, and a replica so faithful that, as the university's own centennial account of it admits, many on campus still believe it is the original.
The original was Father Stephen Badin's. When Badin moved the St. Joseph Mission's center to the lakes and named it Ste. Marie des Lacs (the mission article in the companion file tells that story), he raised a log chapel at the lake's edge to serve as church, mission house and residence in one — the university's Spirit of Notre Dame account dates the building to 1831, when he established the mission; the same account elsewhere calls it a log chapel "erected by Badin as early as 1832," and McAvoy's history gives the chapel as twenty feet wide and thirty-five feet long with a small room about eight feet square at the back where Badin and his successors lived. The 1831/1832 variance is the record's own and is printed as such in the wave note; the building's identity is not in doubt. It was, in the university account's phrase, the first church not only at Notre Dame but in northwest Indiana — the "Indian Chapel," as it came to be known, since its congregation was the Catholic Potawatomi of the valley. Under its floor its second priest was buried: Louis De Seille, dead in 1837, was interred at the foot of its altar, and Benjamin Petit offered Mass over that grave in 1837–38. When Sorin's party arrived in November 1842, the chapel was the mission's principal bequest to them — a one-room cabin with an attic that, in the McGrath Institute's summary, "served all of Notre Dame's needs during its first year": chapel, residence, classroom and headquarters of a university that existed, at first, mostly as an intention.
The original's decline was as quiet as its beginning. As the college's brick buildings rose, the log chapel fell out of use — the university account dates its disuse to 1848, when Sorin moved De Seille's body from the chapel floor to the crypt of the new university church. In 1856 the empty chapel burned to the ground. For fifty years the site was marked only by memory and, in time, by a Founder's Monument on the spot of the "Indian Chapel." What the fire of 1856 took, therefore, was not a working building but the founding artifact itself — which is why, half a century later, the university chose to rebuild it exactly.
The replica rose in 1906, in the centenary year the university would later celebrate as the chapel's own. It was hand-hewn with a broadaxe by William Arnett, a formerly enslaved craftsman from Kentucky, hired — in the Clio entry's account — because he was the man skilled enough to rebuild it with the original tool and method; the reconstruction repeated the original on its own site, beside St. Mary's Lake behind what is now Bond Hall. The replica then became the mission generation's tomb. The remains gathered under and within it, on the fullest accounts: Badin himself, brought back (the university account dates his remains' return from St. Louis to the replica's building year, 1906 — Badin had died at Cincinnati in 1853 and his burial course west is its own small tangle, printed in the wave note only as the sources give it); De Seille; Petit, whose remains completed there the journey told in the companion file; and Father Francois Cointet, the Holy Cross priest of the founding years — "four people buried in the Log Chapel," as the Basilica's rector summarized them in 2013. The chapel stands on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the university's historic district (listed 1978; one reference's claim of a separate 1973 listing is carried as a conflict in the wave note). Its present state in November 2026 is working, not museal: a chapel in regular use for Masses, weddings, baptisms and small gatherings, and the seminarians' place of morning and afternoon prayer — the oldest site on campus doing, at the smallest scale, the thing it was built for in 1831. One famous fact inside its course is a pointer, not a telling: Knute Rockne was baptized in the Log Chapel on 20 November 1925, privately, by Father Vincent Mooney — his record stands in the sports and football files of this build.
Sources: Dorothy V. Corson, "Notre Dame's Log Chapel," The Spirit of Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame (built 1831 at the mission's establishment; "as early as 1832" for the chapel's erection; disuse 1848; destroyed by fire 1856; replica reconstructed 1906, hand-hewn with a broadaxe by William Arnett; Founder's Monument; remains gathered in the replica). McGrath Institute blog, "Sacred Sites of Notre Dame: The Log Chapel" (first building on campus; served all of Notre Dame's needs in its first year; 1906 reproduction). McAvoy, "Father Badin Comes to Notre Dame" (chapel 20 × 35 feet with an 8-foot-square room at the back). The Clio, Log Chapel entry (Arnett's hiring and broadaxe skill). Notre Dame Observer, 2 Oct. 2013 (present uses — weddings, baptisms, Masses, seminarians' prayer; four buried in the Log Chapel). Log Chapel reference entries (1831, destroyed 1856, recreated 1906; part of the Main and South Quadrangles historic district, NRHP 1978; a 1973 listing claim carried as conflict). Arthur J. Hope, Notre Dame — One Hundred Years, ch. XXIX (Rockne baptized in the Log Chapel, 20 Nov. 1925, by Fr. Vincent Mooney — pointer fact only).