A JEWEL IN MILITARY GOTHIC
When President Theodore Roosevelt attended the 1902 centennial observance of the founding of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he became so concerned about the deteriorating state of several of its buildings that he immediately began agitating for their refurbishment. West Point’s academic board, under the direction of Superintendent Colonel Albert L. Mills, responded by drawing up a list of the academy’s architectural shortcomings and making recommendations for improvements. With Roosevelt’s enthusiastic support and the approval of Congress, a vast building program was laid out, with a new chapel slated to be the dominant structure. A budget of $6.5 million was allocated for the entire project—a tremendous sum at the time.
The daunting task of overseeing the massive project was assigned to two men. One was Mills; the other was Colonel Charles W. Larned, a professor of drawing at West Point. Larned, an 1870 graduate of West Point had served as a second lieutenant in Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry, participating in the Yellowstone expedition across the Montana and Dakota territories in the summer of 1873, when gold was reported in the Black Hills, the ancestral home of the Lakota Sioux. Larned took part in three skirmishes with the Lakota. Fortunately for him, after the expedition
