The chapel was built to house the combined academic, administrative, and religious activities of the college. Proposed by Laomi Baldwin of Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a broadside structure on the model of Charles Bulfinch's University Hall (1814) at Harvard, it was ultimately built by local joiner Asahel Parsons on the model of Peter Banner's gable-front Lyceum (1802–1804) on Yale's Old Brick Row. The facade of a simple, mill-like mass is embellished with a central entrance tower served by a double flight of stairs and crowned with an octagonal Greek Revival cupola that functioned as the college's first observatory.