Trinity College’s Long Walk buildings are the result of a collaboration between the English architect Willliam Burges (1827-1881) and Francis Hatch Kimball (1845-1919), a Hartford-based architect Trinity’s Trustees engaged to supervise construction. Kimball worked with Burges in London and returned to America in 1874 with Burges’s final proposal, which consisted of a series of buildings in four immense quadrangles arranged in linear configuration. Kimball adapted Burges’s designs to the site of the College’s new campus on Rocky Ridge.
This collection consists of working drawings showing Kimball’s adaptations of Burges’s designs for a lecture room block (Seabury Hall) and a dormitory block (Jarvis Hall). The adaptations received Burges’s approval before construction was completed in 1878. Northam Towers was not added until 1883. The Long Walk is considered the finest example in America of High Victorian Collegiate Gothic architecture.
In 2008, the Watkinson Library and College Archives held an exhibition on the drawings and the history of the Long Walk buildings. The catalog for this exhibit, by College Archivist Peter Knapp, contains additional information on this important piece of Trinity history, and is available here to read or download.