Old College — the 1843 building and its long second life

Old College is the building the college actually began in, and the only one of the founding group still standing on its feet. The Log Chapel was inherited; Old College was built — in 1843, by Sorin and the Holy Cross brothers, within months of their arrival, while the ambitious college building Sorin had planned on paper (a double-hammer block 160 feet long, in the centennial history's telling) waited for money, bricks and men. What rose instead by St. Mary's Lake was a small square brick building of two stories, and Sorin packed a whole institution into it: the university's campus tour, in its own summary, lists dormitories for the students and for the Holy Cross priests and brothers, a classroom, a clothing room, a bakery and a dining hall — the centennial history's list runs the same: student dormitory, brothers' dormitory, refectory, bakery, classroom, clothes room. It was, in the tour's plain words, built in 1843 by the founder and the brothers, and it is "the oldest remaining building on campus" — oldest standing, a distinction the Log Chapel's replica makes necessary and which the sources observe when they call Old College "the only original landmark on the campus."

Its first collegiate year was the college's first, full stop. Ready by the fall of 1843, it housed the school's first five students and the seven more who joined them in the following months. Then the building began the long series of second lives that is its real course. When the first true college building (the first Main Building) went up in the fall of 1844, the priests and students moved into it, and Old College was converted to a residence for the Sisters of the Holy Cross — the sisters who cooked and did the laundry for the youngest students — and served for a time as a temporary infirmary before that function, too, moved to the new building. Across its history the reference summaries collect its lives in one line: it housed the Sisters of the Holy Cross, it housed the Brothers of Holy Cross, and it was the college bakery. Fire touched it, as fire touched everything wooden-roofed in the early campus — one campus survey calls it a victim of one of the early fires and "only a fraction of what it used to be," a claim the institutional tour and the centennial history do not repeat, and which is carried in the wave note as an unverified secondary claim rather than built into the building's course here. What is documented is survival: through the fires that took the Main Buildings of 1843's successors and the music hall in 1879, the little brick building by the lake stood, dwarfed — in the centennial history's affectionate image — like a shrunken mother among her well-grown children, to the right of the library by St. Mary's Lake in deep shade.

Its present life closes the circle of its first one. Old College is today the undergraduate seminary for the Congregation of Holy Cross — carried in the sources variously as the seminary of the Indiana province and of the United States Province, a wording variance in the province's own reorganization era, printed as found — home to undergraduate men pursuing their degrees at the university while discerning a call to religious life, working alongside the major seminarians of Moreau Seminary across St. Joseph's Lake. A dormitory for young men studying under Holy Cross rule in 1843; a dormitory for young men studying under Holy Cross rule in 2026: of all the buildings in this section, Old College has changed its use the least, whatever its tenants' titles have been. It stands in the National Register historic district with the rest of the old quad, in daily residential use, at the true size of its record — two stories of brick that carried a university for its first year and then got on with being useful for 183 more.

Sources: University of Notre Dame Campus Tour, "Old College" (built 1843 by Sorin and the brothers; oldest remaining building on campus; original contents — dormitories, classroom, clothing room, bakery, dining hall; now the undergraduate seminary for the Indiana province of the Congregation of Holy Cross). Arthur J. Hope, Notre Dame — One Hundred Years, ch. IV (the deferred 160-foot plan; the small square two-story brick building actually built; its packed contents; "the only original landmark on the campus"; its place by St. Mary's Lake). Old College reference entries (ready fall 1843; first five students and seven more; conversion in 1844 to the sisters' residence and temporary infirmary; sisters, brothers and bakery among its uses; today the undergraduate seminary of the United States Province; NRHP district, 23 May 1978). 247Sports campus survey (first brick building claim; fire-and-fraction claim carried as unverified — see wave note).