Why Is Nassau Hall More Than a Campus Landmark?
The most photographed building on the Princeton campus is the one that everyone walks past first. Nassau Hall sits directly inside the FitzRandolph Gate on the south side of Nassau Street, a long, low, three-story stone rectangle with a small clock tower at its center, built in 1756 as the entire campus of what was then the College of New Jersey. For seventy years, Nassau Hall was the college. Every classroom, every dormitory bed, every faculty office, the dining hall, and the chapel sat under its roof. Walking through the front door today, you are walking into a building that has been in continuous academic use for 270 years — older than the United States, older than the U.S. Constitution, older than most American institutions of any kind.
That alone would make Nassau Hall worth seeing. But the building's actual history is much stranger than its current decorous front-of-campus role suggests. It has been a college, a Continental Army barracks, a British Army headquarters, a Continental Army battlefield, a Continental Congress meeting place, the temporary U.S. capitol, an emergency hospital, and the site of a six-hour artillery battle that left a cannonball hole in its north wall. The two cannons buried muzzle-down on Cannon Green directly behind the building are not symbolic decorations placed by the university for atmosphere — they are British cannons captured during the Battle of Princeton in January 1777 and dragged a mile back to campus where they have been displayed ever since. The building's wall still has visible damage from that battle.
For an international visitor on a campus tour, Nassau Hall is usually pointed at briefly and then walked past. This article gives you what to look for if you stand on the lawn for ten minutes and want to read what the building actually is — what happened inside, what the marks on the walls mean, and why so much of American institutional history concentrated in this one stone rectangle in central New Jersey.
What the Building Is
Nassau Hall was completed in 1756 and named after King William III of the House of Nassau-Orange, who was associated with Protestant academic causes. At the time of its completion, it was the largest stone academic building in the British North American colonies — 175 feet long, 50 feet wide, three stories tall. The architect was Robert Smith of Philadelphia, the same designer who later did Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia.
The choice of stone was deliberate and consequential. Most American academic buildings of the period were wooden; the College of New Jersey's trustees specifically wanted a stone building that would survive fire. The decision had unintended consequences in 1802 and 1855, when fires gutted the interior of the building twice but left the stone shell standing. Each time the interior was rebuilt; the exterior is largely original 1756 stone, with later restoration work concentrated on roof, windows, and tower.
The building's overall shape — a long Georgian-Palladian rectangle with a central pediment and a small clock tower — became a template for early American academic buildings. Brown's University Hall (1770), Rutgers' Old Queens (1809), and Dartmouth's Dartmouth Hall (1791) all follow patterns Smith's design helped establish. Walking onto the front lawn at Princeton and then visiting these other early American campuses, you can see the architectural inheritance directly.
What Happened Inside It Before Princeton Was Princeton
The College of New Jersey was founded in 1746 (originally in Elizabeth, NJ, then briefly in Newark) and moved to Princeton when Nassau Hall was completed. For the next 75 years the building was the entire institution. The faculty taught in classrooms on the second floor; students slept four-to-a-room in the dormitories that ran along the third floor; meals were taken in a long dining hall that occupied the western end. James Madison, John Witherspoon, Aaron Burr, and the future president of the university Samuel Davies all lived inside this building during their student or faculty years.
The building's central role meant that when American history happened in central New Jersey, it happened in Nassau Hall.
1776–1777: At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the College of New Jersey closed temporarily. Continental Army units used Nassau Hall as a barracks during 1776. When the British Army drove south through New Jersey in late 1776 — pursuing George Washington's retreating Continental Army across the state — the British occupied Princeton in December 1776 and used Nassau Hall as their own headquarters. The building's interior was significantly damaged by the British occupation; furniture was burned for fuel, library books were destroyed, the chapel's organ was taken apart for parts.
January 3, 1777: The Battle of Princeton was fought one mile southwest of campus, when Washington's army surprised the British and Hessian forces stationed in town. After the main battle on the open fields at what is now Princeton Battlefield State Park, about 200 British soldiers retreated to Nassau Hall and barricaded themselves inside. American artillery, including a battery directed by Captain Alexander Hamilton (then 22 years old, on Washington's staff), fired on the building from the north. One cannonball passed through a north-wall window and decapitated a portrait of King George II hanging in the prayer hall. After about an hour of artillery exchange, the British surrendered. The battle ended.
1783: The Continental Congress met in Nassau Hall from June through November 1783 — for six months, the building functioned as the de facto U.S. capitol. During this period the Treaty of Paris was ratified inside the building, formally ending the Revolutionary War. George Washington came to Princeton to receive the formal thanks of Congress. He sat for a portrait by Charles Willson Peale that now hangs inside the building, in the same prayer hall (now called the Faculty Room) where the King George II portrait had been damaged six years earlier.
The Faculty Room is open to visitors during business hours. The Washington portrait — the most expensive and most consequential painting in the Princeton collection — hangs at the front of the room. Below it, the original frame from the King George II portrait remains, with a rectangular hole where the canvas was. The two paintings, one whole and one absent, are usually pointed out as a paired display: a king replaced by a general, with the portrait frame standing as evidence of the moment that replacement happened.
The Cannon, the Cannons
Cannon Green is the small lawn directly behind Nassau Hall. Two iron cannons are buried muzzle-down in the ground at the south end of the green. Both are British cannons captured at the Battle of Princeton in 1777. The larger of the two — about ten feet long, badly weathered — was dragged from the battlefield to the campus immediately after the battle and left there as a war trophy.
The cannon's history after 1777 is one of the more entertaining stories in American campus history. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, students at the College of New Jersey (Princeton's predecessor) and students at Rutgers in New Brunswick fought over the cannon. Rutgers students attempted to steal the cannon several times — the longest distance they successfully transported it was about 20 miles, before Princeton students retrieved it. Eventually, Princeton's groundskeepers buried the cannon muzzle-down in concrete to make further theft physically impossible. The buried position is the position you see today. The cannon has been there in concrete for nearly 200 years.
The smaller cannon next to it has a parallel story. Both cannons are now permanent fixtures of the green and figure prominently in graduation traditions, photo opportunities, and the Princeton-Rutgers football rivalry that, while less intense than it was in 1875, still trades on the cannon-stealing legacy.
The Bullet Hole
On the north side of Nassau Hall, in the second-story exterior wall, there is a small hole in the stone. The hole is roughly an inch wide and is positioned about six feet above the ground, accessible to a curious visitor walking along the building's north face. It is widely identified as a bullet hole or cannonball impact from the January 1777 battle.
Whether the hole is from American artillery firing on the British holed up inside or from a British musket fired during the surrender remains technically uncertain. The university's official position is that the damage is from the battle. The hole is unmarked and not signposted; you find it by walking along the north wall and looking carefully. It is the most direct physical evidence of the battle that the building still carries.
What to Look For on a Visit
Standing on the front lawn at the FitzRandolph Gate, here is what is worth pausing on:
The two tigers flanking the front entrance. They are 1911 sculptures by A. Phimister Proctor, replacing earlier 19th-century lions. Princeton's mascot is a tiger; the building's entrance is the symbolic front door of the university. Touching one is a tradition for graduating seniors.
The clock tower. The current clock tower is a 1855 reconstruction after the second fire; the original tower was destroyed. The clock face is unusual in that it has only three hands — the seconds hand was added in the 20th century. The tower is now a campus landmark visible from much of the central town.
The rear (south) facade and Cannon Green. Walk through the central archway of Nassau Hall — yes, the building is a passage as well as a structure, and you can walk under it from the north side to the south side. On the south side you arrive on Cannon Green. The two cannons sit in the southwest corner. The view from the back of the building looks down over the historic campus quad.
The Faculty Room (formerly the Prayer Hall). Open to visitors during normal business hours. Enter through the main north-facing door. The Washington portrait, the King George II frame, the historical placards along the walls — this is the room where the Continental Congress sat in 1783.
Maclean House: Just to the west of Nassau Hall sits Maclean House, the former president's residence built in 1756 as part of the original campus. It is now the office of the Alumni Affairs department but is also occasionally open to visitors for institutional events.
The North Wall bullet hole. Walk along the north side of the building from the main entrance toward the east end. The hole is about two-thirds of the way along the wall, at second-story height. It is small and unsignposted; if you do not look for it carefully you will miss it.
How the Building Frames the Campus
The current Princeton campus has roughly 200 buildings spread across more than 600 acres. Nassau Hall sits at the symbolic and historical center of the campus, but only at the geometric north end of it. The walk from Nassau Hall south through the Front Campus, past the residential colleges, through the Princeton University Chapel, and on toward the Arts and Engineering district at the southern edge takes about 25 minutes. Nassau Hall is where you start, not where the campus ends.
But the building remains the institution's single most freighted symbol. The university president's office is still in Nassau Hall. The Board of Trustees meets in Nassau Hall. Honorary degrees are awarded on its steps. When the institution wants to convey what it considers itself to be — old, deliberate, continuous, accountable to its founding moment — it photographs Nassau Hall.
For an international visitor, the value of pausing here for fifteen minutes rather than walking past in three is that the building is a much more direct narrative of American history than most campus landmarks anywhere in the country. The cannons are not metaphors. The portrait frame is not metaphor. The bullet hole is not metaphor. The Continental Congress actually ratified the Treaty of Paris in the room you can walk into. Princeton's institutional identity is not abstract; it is wrapped around the physical object of this building, and the building is older than the country it now represents.