Irvine Memorial Chapel Turns 100

By Lee Owen P ’24

Long before the Irvine Memorial Chapel towered above the Mercersburg campus—and the surrounding area, as the highest man-made point for miles around—the school grounds already contained a “Chapel Hill.”

Mercersburg Academy’s founding headmaster Dr. William Mann Irvine had dreamed of a chapel to serve as an intentional focal point for his nascent institution since his arrival on what became the Academy campus in 1893. Irvine would frequently ask his young daughter, Hart, to accompany him on walks with his two hunting dogs to the southern region of the school grounds. 

As Hart recalled (more than 120 years ago now), “No matter what fields we tramped, we usually came home to North Cottage via ‘Chapel Hill,’ as it was then called, where Father would set me on the top rail of the fence which bounded the field and tell me of the Chapel to rise there some day. A long look around the circle of mountains, a rest, a whistle to the dogs to come in, a vision of a Chapel there—and home to supper.”

Irvine entrusted iconic architect Ralph Adams Cram with the design; Cram’s profile was such that in December 1926, just two months following the Chapel’s dedication, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

In the 33 years preceding the Chapel’s construction, services and other “Chapel” programs typically took place inside a wing of Main Hall. At an alumni event held shortly after the building opened, alumnus Robert Brotemarkle of the Class of 1912 addressed Dr. Irvine’s vision for the building as a spiritual center and moral compass for the school.

“You sent us from that old Chapel [as] men,” Brotemarkle said in a toast to Irvine. “I then went up the hill to the beautiful new Chapel, and as I looked at it in the moonlight, I thought, ‘If you could make men of the Mercersburg boys in the old Chapel, with the new Chapel you will make giants.’”

 

1926 (and before) to 1946

Mercersburg Academy’s original goal—and by “Mercersburg Academy” in this context, what one ultimately means is “William Mann Irvine,” as the school’s founding headmaster during its earliest years was its face, its architect, its chief decision-maker, and its visionary—was for ground to be officially broken for a chapel by 1918. This date was chosen, at least in part, to commemorate the 25th year of the school’s existence as a college preparatory institution and of Dr. Irvine’s headmastership. Yet that target came and went without shovels displacing and moving dirt, and for a pretty important reason.

The world was at war.

Roughly 1,770 Mercersburg alumni (including recent graduates and even students who left school to enlist) fought in World War I; 56 of them perished. A memorial chapel would be dedicated to their memory (and, in later years, to future alumni who died in service to their country). The Chapel also was dedicated in honor of the mothers who sent their boys to study at Mercersburg Academy.

As a speaker articulated during chapel services: “We must now win this war. Now is not the time to build a church. That will come later.”

As early as 1901, school leaders—at, of course, the behest of Dr. Irvine—agreed that a “chapel fund” should be established to underpin construction costs. An initial number of $10,000 was suggested, though Irvine pushed for 10 times that amount. Preliminary sketches of the Chapel were released in 1916, with the building’s construction originally slated to cost $200,000. As plans turned into reality (and as Dr. Irvine almost maniacally obsessed over every detail, going so far as to have members of the community test out potential pews to evaluate their comfort), the cost grew to roughly $800,000 in 1910 dollars.

In June 1924, the cornerstone for the Chapel was laid by Grace Coolidge, wife of then-Vice President Calvin Coolidge and parent of Mercersburg students John (1924) and Calvin Jr. (1926). Grace Coolidge was the first female member of the school’s Board of Regents. She and her family suffered unspeakable tragedy when Cal Jr. died in the summer of 1924 of sepsis when a blister he acquired while playing on the White House tennis court turned into an infection. The Coolidges donated a gold cross to the Academy in Cal Jr.’s memory, which has been present in chapel services for the past 100 years.

The Chapel roof was completed in September 1925, and the school began utilizing the building on a limited basis for various events by spring 1926, although the official dedication did not occur until October 13, 1926, which was Dr. Irvine’s 61st birthday. Mrs. Coolidge, now the First Lady of the United States following her husband’s election in 1924, was in attendance, as were more than 60 headmasters of or representatives from American preparatory schools, colleges, universities, and seminaries. Rose petals from an airplane flying overhead blanketed the campus in celebration.

“This building is the outward and visible symbol of what Mercersburg has tried to put into the hearts of all her boys through the long years—strength, beauty, sweetness, consecration,” Irvine said in his remarks during the dedication.

“If this house does not make our boys better men, then we have failed… The message of this Chapel is that man must give his very best to God.”

Anton Brees closed the service by offering the inaugural recessional from the Swoope Carillon. Thousands more recessionals and recitals have followed in the century since, and the legendary Bryan Barker [page 73] would succeed Brees as Academy carillonneur beginning in 1929. Barker served in the role for an astounding 52 years, retiring in 1981.

The inaugural Christmas Candlelight Service was held in December 1926.

Following Dr. Irvine’s passing in 1928, Boyd Edwards was chosen as the Academy’s second headmaster. Edwards was a close friend of Dr. Irvine. He also fit right into the fabric of the school, as he was already well known as a frequent and popular chapel speaker—even in the six years immediately prior to his appointment, which he spent as headmaster of Mercersburg’s historic rival, The Hill School. 

On February 19, 1930, Edwin Myers of Mercersburg’s Class of 1925 became the first alumnus of the school to be married in the Chapel when he and his wife, Louise, exchanged vows. [For a look at some of the many weddings held in the building over the decades, see the photos and stories starting on page 38].

Edwards retired in 1941 and was succeeded by Charles Tippetts, the first of two Mercersburg alumni to serve as headmaster. Tippetts was the valedictorian of the school’s Class of 1912.

As the Chapel completed its second decade of service to the Academy community, fresh was the jubilation following the end of World War II, but also sorrow with the loss of 95 alumni killed in the hostilities.

 

1946-1966

In October 1946, the school published a booklet titled “Complete the Campus Picture,” which contained sketches of a future academic building which eventually became Irvine Hall. As the booklet stated, “the general design for the building was chosen as Neo-Greek in order to harmonize earlier buildings with [the architecture of] the Chapel.” Irvine Hall opened in 1950.

The Chapel received a sound system in the fall of 1952, which included microphones on the pulpit, lectern, and movable wrought-iron pulpit designed by noted Philadelphia blacksmith/ironworker Samuel Yellin. Loudspeakers were installed in the two transepts and the east and west sides of the nave.

Rainy weather forced the Academy’s 60th Commencement to be held inside the Chapel in June 1953. The valedictorian of that year’s graduating class was future Headmaster Walter H. Burgin Jr. ’53, who received several Commencement prizes, including the Gold Chain for distinguished service to the school and the Bausch and Lomb Science Medal.

In spring 1960, The Mercersburg News reported on repair work to the building which included repointing of the Chapel spire atop the roof and protective glass installed for safety in front of some of the stained-glass windows; the latter was part of a project that began as the building started its fourth decade of service.

That fall, a surprise guest greeted students at Opening Exercises (the equivalent of the school’s present-day Opening Convocation): Academy Award-winning actor and Mercersburg alum Jimmy Stewart ’28 was the featured speaker at the event in the Chapel. “Give importance to everything you do in Mercersburg and approach your work with vigor and enthusiasm and hope,” he told the boys.

Stewart’s address coincided with the first (and only) opening of school led by Wilmarth Jacobs, a member of the faculty for 37 years. Jacobs served as acting headmaster from the time Tippetts retired in summer 1960 until William Fowle was officially appointed the Academy’s fourth headmaster in April 1961.

Fowle guided the school through a number of weighty issues during his tenure as head, with integration (1964) and the return of coeducation (1969) certainly among them. A far less pressing challenge—though still a weighty one, albeit in a different sense—came when students saved and hoarded large amounts of pennies to load up the offering plate during chapel services in hopes of toppling the unsuspecting student usher carrying the plate. This prank became known as “Penny Sunday,” and Fowle threatened to “take away [the students’] privilege to give to the Chapel.” (Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed.)  

 

1966-1986

No academic institution is immune from or isolated from societal changes, and this was certainly the case for Mercersburg Academy in the 1960s. Resistance was building among segments of the student body against required attendance at worship services. A 1966 student poll, however, indicated that 72 percent of students would attend at least one chapel service a week if it were no longer required.

At that point in the school’s history, four chapel services a week were required: on Tuesdays and Thursdays and on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

In 1968, David Yount was appointed the Academy’s first official chaplain, and a chapel committee composed of students and faculty was created to study issues of religious and spiritual life on campus. Still, momentum against required chapel services continued to grow among students, and on Thursday, April 10, 1969, roughly half the student body walked out of that morning’s chapel service in protest. 

The student protestors went to Boone Hall, and were later joined by the remainder of the student body and by Headmaster Fowle and school leaders, who engaged with the students in spirited conversation and argument surrounding the issue. “The ensuing discussion (sometimes debate) in Boone Hall proved to be the most honest and constructive faculty-student dialogue to occur perhaps in the school history,” the News wrote.

The ultimate result—announced by Fowle two weeks later—was the end of required chapel services at Mercersburg, though optional services continued. Later that spring, student members of the chapel committee visited four other prep schools in New England (The Loomis Institute/now Loomis Chaffee School, Philips Academy Andover, St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, and Philips Exeter Academy) to compare religious life and how it intersected with school policies on each campus.

In the fall of 1970, members of the varsity football team unanimously voted to attend voluntary chapel services together. Their new coach that season? Donald Hubert, whose daughter Katherine Titus P ’20, ’23 would become the Academy’s first female head of school more than four decades later, in 2016.

The News wrote in January 1971 that, following a significant decline in student chapel attendance in 1969-1970 (which might be expected when a required activity on a school campus becomes optional), weekly attendance had climbed to as much as 334 for voluntary Sunday chapel services. “Student hostility and disruptiveness has disappeared, and each person worships because he chooses to do so,” said the Rev. Dugald Chaffee P ’71, who had replaced Yount as school chaplain in the fall of 1969.

Chaffee himself was succeeded by the Rev. Robert Carter on an acting basis in 1971 prior to the appointment of M. Jeffrey Moredock as the Academy’s first school minister in the fall of 1973. While Moredock was the first person to officially hold the position of school minister, both Chaffee and Carter were ordained ministers (and Dr. Boyd Edwards was an ordained minister in the Congregational Church when he was appointed the school’s second headmaster back in 1928).

Moredock spent six years as school minister and later served as head of school at independent schools in California, Maryland, New York, and Virginia, and as chief operating officer of the National Association of Independent Schools.

In 1974, the Chapel undercroft (the space underneath the sanctuary, which was more commonly known at the time as “the crypt”) was turned into a student lounge and coffeehouse billed as The Other Door and later Whole Wheat Arena. The space exists today as a classroom often utilized for religion classes, and the adjacent space for many years functioned as a nursery (staffed by Academy students on a volunteer basis) for young children of faculty, staff, and community members attending the school’s weekly ecumenical worship service one floor above.

Lawrence “Larry” Jones began the first of two separate tenures as Mercersburg’s school minister when he succeeded Moredock in the role in fall 1979; his ordination service as a minister in the Presbyterian Church was held in the Chapel in November 1980.

Sadly, just a week before Jones’ ordination, the Chapel filled with students for a different reason: Carol Amorocho ’81 passed away on campus, and following an all-school gathering in Boone Hall next door where Headmaster Walter Burgin ’53 announced the heartbreaking news, students gravitated to the Chapel as a way to begin processing the tragedy. The death of Amorocho, a popular member of the senior class who was immensely involved in many facets of school life, stunned the community. A Commencement prize was established in Amorocho’s memory; it continues to be awarded each year to the member of the senior class who has best exhibited “the energy and enthusiasm and effort that were so much a part of Carol Amorocho’s brief life.”

In the spring of 1982, the Carroll H. Hendrickson Chapel Organ Recital was established by alumni E. Mason Hendrickson ’40 and John D. Hendrickson II ’43 “in honor of their father and his appreciation of organ music.”

 

1986-2006

In the fall of 1990, Massachusetts native Paul Galey P ’00, ’02 arrived at Mercersburg as school minister. He succeeded Jones, who moved just up Interstate 81 for a pastoral position in Camp Hill, PA; three years later, Jones was appointed head pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Marquette, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where he remained until returning to Mercersburg in 2006.

Tragedy struck the community in just the second week of school that fall, when senior Erin Carey ’91 died in a car accident on the way to campus from her home in Hagerstown, MD. Carey, a captain and four-year member of the varsity volleyball team, was headed to meet the team bus on a Saturday morning for an away match at Randolph-Macon Academy. When word of her fatal accident reached Mercersburg, her teammates and other students and community members made their way to the Chapel to be together in prayer and grief.

(A statue in Carey’s memory, titled “Forever Young,” was completed prior to Commencement for the Class of 1991. It can be found in a cultivated garden on campus between Fowle Hall and Spider Field.)

As part of the school’s celebration of its centennial in 1993, the Chapel was formally rededicated as the Irvine Memorial Chapel.

Walter Burgin retired as headmaster in 1997 after 25 years, and his successor, Douglas Hale, was officially introduced to the school community during an installation service within the Chapel.

Galey stepped down as school minister in 2000, though he remained chair of the religion department (which he led for 14 years) and continued to coach and serve in the school’s counseling department. He later received the Ammerman Distinguished Teaching Award for Religious & Interdisciplinary Studies. Galey’s successor as school minister, Amelia Becker, joined the community after teaching religion and working within the discipline at both Arizona State University and Long Island University.

On the first day of the 2001-2002 academic year, the 9/11 attacks stunned the world and the Mercersburg community. Less than two hours after the first hijacked plane crashed into the World Trade Center (and just minutes after United Airlines Flight 93 went down in a field some 75 miles northwest of campus near Shanksville, PA), the entire school gathered in the Chapel for an address from Hale as all tried to make sense of the unfathomable.

“It was tremendously reassuring for all of us to be together at such a critical moment,” Hale wrote in the winter 2002 issue of Mercersburg Academy magazine. “I was also newly grateful at that time to have a place like the Chapel in which to gather and speak to the school; it seemed the very embodiment of sacredness and safety that our students and faculty needed on that day.”

Peter Dietz was appointed school minister in fall 2003. Dietz joined the Chapel and community from Princeton, NJ, where he graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary (which, coincidentally, is also the alma mater of Mercersburg’s former and later-to-be-again School Minister Larry Jones; Jones eventually succeeded Dietz in the role three years later after Dietz left to serve as a chaplain in the U.S. Navy). 

 

2006-2026

The Burgin Center for the Arts opened its doors at the start of the 2006-2007 academic year. While some school meetings and selected guest speakers in the school’s lecture series moved just down the Quad to the new building’s Simon Theatre, the Chapel continued to host other events in the series—along with annual touchstones of the school calendar, such as Opening Convocation in September, the Cum Laude Convocation each spring, Baccalaureate the evening prior to Commencement, and the Service of Worship and Remembrance during Reunion Weekend, which honors the memory of alumni who have passed away during the previous calendar year. (The Chapel also hosts a Baccalaureate service for James Buchanan High School in the borough of Mercersburg in advance of the local public high school’s graduation ceremony, and is the setting for popular biannual performances of major choral works by the Mercersburg Area Community Chorus.)

In October 2006, a delicate, long-term, and crucial restoration project for the Chapel’s 40 stained-glass windows officially commenced. The project was initially led and directed by prolific stained-glass artisan Dieter Goldkuhle, who is perhaps best known for his work inside the Washington National Cathedral. At Mercersburg, restoration efforts were (and are) dedicated to preserving and protecting these priceless works of nine international artisans. (Restoration remains ongoing two decades later, and following Goldkuhle’s 2011 death, his son Andrew is diligently spearheading the process.)

An evening gathering was held in May 2010 to remember the life and mourn the passing of Trisha Bassi ’10, who died in her home state of New Jersey just weeks before Commencement, and unplanned school meetings were called in fall 2018 and fall 2019 to convey news of the deaths of recent graduates Joe Beauregard ’18 and Jack Sweeney ’19. (And just a few months ago, in spring 2026, the Chapel once again became a space for the processing of grief and sadness as the community was stunned—on the same day—by news of the tragic losses of young alumna Kalwa “Kali” Tembo ’23 and staff member Buffi Barnes Smith.) 

Larry Jones retired after 20 combined years as school minister following the 2014-2015 academic year. His successor, Will Whitmore, was also a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, and joined Mercersburg from the Rectory School in Connecticut. Like his predecessors, Whitmore taught classes in the religion department; one such offering was a term course titled “Introduction to the New Testament: The Gospel Through Stained Glass.” A quote from Dr. Irvine during the 1926 Chapel dedication appeared on the front of the course syllabus: “Beauty must be an outward expression of truth felt by the heart, or beauty itself is dead.” Whitmore was ordained within the United Church of Christ at a 2017 ceremony in the Chapel.

Hale’s retirement as head of school at the close of the 2015-2016 academic year opened the door for the appointment of Katie Titus as Mercersburg’s seventh head of school—and its first female leader. Titus was formally installed that fall in a ceremony within the same Chapel where her father’s football squad voted to voluntarily attend weekly services as a team, less than two years following the Chapel walkout.

Six years later, in fall 2022, Titus’ successor Quentin McDowell P ’25, ’27 officially became just the school’s eighth headmaster in 129 years at his installation ceremony inside the walls and below the windows of the Chapel—a sacred place on this hallowed campus which is truly like no other.

William Mann Irvine would be proud.