Founded as a German Reformed seminary in 1825 in Carlisle, it soon moved to York and then in 1837 to Mercersburg. The removal of Marshall College in Mercersburg to join Franklin College in Lancaster in 1853 caused the seminary to follow suit in 1871. In 1893 it commissioned a Harrisburg architect to design an all-purpose building with classrooms, administrative offices, and a chapel in the semicircular extension. It pays homage to H. H. Richardson in the great Syrian arch of the entrance, but its strongly differentiated volumes expressing different functions and wildly asymmetrical composition make it very much a descendent of Frank Furness's University of Pennsylvania Library (
PH147.3). Sensitively restored, it is a regional treasure.