Building was an event in seventeenth-century America. In 1637, a “schoale, or colledge,” for which the Massachusetts General Court had voted four hundred pounds the previous year, was “ordered to be at New Towne.” The next year, the name of New Towne was changed to Cambridge, and the “colledge was ordered to be called Harvard College.” Thirty-four years later, the first building was falling into disrepair. The towns of the colony were called upon to make an appropriation for a new one, “of brick and stone,” and the agency for building it was given to Deacon John Cooper and one William Manning.