In his Convocation address on August 30, 2007, Trinity College President James F. Jones, Jr., shared with the incoming first-year class, their families, and other members of the College community news of an unusual discovery that was made a few weeks earlier during renovation of the College’s historic Long Walk buildings. In early August, while renovating the basement area of the Seabury building, workers unearthed a stone, tucked under a stairwell, with the engraving, “1845.” The stone was discovered to be the cornerstone of Brownell Hall, a dormitory and the last of the three buildings constructed on the College’s first campus at the site of the current state capitol building in Hartford.

The mystery of the Brownell stone begins in the early 1870s when the contractor charged with building architect William Burges’s Long Walk buildings hauled the cornerstone of Brownell Hall to the new construction site and stored the artifact in the basement of Seabury Hall.   Nearly 140 years later, the stone, measuring 16” x 12” and perhaps 8” thick—the size of a small suitcase, according to Peter Knapp, College archivist—stands as a tangible link between the College’s past, present, and future. In addition to the Brownell stone, five stone memorial plaques, inscribed in Latin and dated in the 1850s, were also located. The individuals memorialized in the plaques all died before the Civil War and before they graduated.