Historical Photo of the Week - The Chapel

The center of Towers Hall once contained this magnificent chapel. Daily services, lectures, concerts, plays, dances, conventions and mock conventions were held in this space for just over eighty years. An addition, the United Brethren congregation that is today the United Methodist Church of the Master held services in the Otterbein chapel until its building was built across the street in 1916.

The chapel fell into disuse after the completion of Cowan Memorial Hall in 1951. To accommodate the growing library collection, the chapel was gutted and filled with three floors of bookshelves. A reading room was added to the back of Towers, and the Centennial Library was born. After the Courtright Memorial Library was completed in 1972, the floors that filled the old chapel were converted into offices for the math, computer science and history departments. Today the only remnant of the chapel is the curved wall on the second floor of Towers.