The Rebuild in One Summer — and the Name

1879–1886 · the present Main Building

The promise was kept to the week. Professor Stace's contemporary account, reprinted in the jubilee history from the Catholic Review of 3 May 1879, gives the community the fire found: thirty fathers, twelve scholastics, 141 professed lay brothers, sixty novices, and twelve postulants, with nearly 400 students and professors in the establishment. Willoughby J. Edbrooke's plan — afterward architect of the United States Treasury — was selected from among thirty submitted. Ground was broken on 17 May 1879; some 300 laborers worked sixteen-hour days and a reported 4.3 million bricks went into the walls; classes opened on 8 September 1879 with three of the building's five stories finished. The east and west wings followed in 1884. The finished Main Building runs 144,000 square feet, its rotunda rising to the dome and Luigi Gregori's Columbus frescoes in the entrance hall; the dome's interior paintings were completed and the dome opened with services on 29 May 1890, Bishop Keane present and William J. Onahan of Chicago orating, its allegorical figures named Religion, Philosophy, Poetry, Law, and Science.

The dome's own course corrects a common compression. The dome was finished in September 1882 and its statue raised that October, both ungilded; the Council of Administration refused the gold leaf, the deadlock ran into 1886, and the first gilding that year cost $2,000 against a $4,000 appeal — Notre Dame Magazine's documented account, on University Archives figures. The statue's size, long carried in conflicting figures, is settled by the university's own record of the dome's twelfth gilding in 2023: seventeen feet tall and 4,000 pounds. The name has a parallel legal course. The charter of 1844 incorporated "the University of Notre Dame du Lac," and that remained the legal style through the charter's amendments of 1845, 1873, and 1937; the Scholastic's 1893 sketch already notes the name "now generally shortened to Notre Dame," and when governance passed in 1967 to the mixed body the charter document creates, it was constituted under the full name — "The Fellows of the University of Notre Dame du Lac." The "du Lac" survives in law long after it left common speech.

1. A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac (1895), incl. Stace's account
2. Notre Dame Magazine, "The Dome, gilded at last, 1886"; University Archives figures
3. University of Notre Dame, 2023 dome restoration record; Charter of the University (1967 Statutes note)