The Joseph A. Hill Memorial Chapel recently underwent eight months of extensive interior and exterior renovations.​ The Chapel reopened on June 23 for public use, as can be noticed by its bell occasionally ringing throughout the day.

Long before its recent renovations and subsequent reopening, the Joseph A. Hill Memorial Chapel has an extensively long history with West Texas A&M University.

Among the renovations were new exterior doors, repairs to the chapel’s stonework and sidewalks, LED lighting remodeling of rooms on each side of the chancel, new flooring, and extensive landscaping, a new bell and remodeling in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Joseph A. Hill Memorial Chapel is named after WT’s second and longest-serving university president, Joseph A. Hill, who served in the office from 1918 to 1948. He was preceded in the office by WT’s first president, R.B Cousins, who served in the office from the university’s establishment in 1910 to 1918 after whom the Cousins Hall Dormitory is named and was subsequently succeeded in the office by WT’s third president James P. Cornette who served in the office from 1948 to 1973 after whom the Cornette Library is named.

And now for some general facts about the chapel itself. It first opened its doors to the WT community on Oct. 21, 1950. The building’s cornerstone was placed earlier the same year, on June 9, on the campus of what was then known as West Texas State Teachers College. The university did not officially become the WT as we know it today until it was added to the Texas A&M network of campuses in 1989 after a private fundraising campaign started in 1944.

The memorial chapel stands on a 2,590-square-foot lot right near the middle of WT and is both the only privately funded chapel on a public university campus in the state of Texas and one of only a few chapels ever built on a public university campus in the state of Texas.

The chapel has hosted over 100 weddings since 2014, when the Jack B. Kelly Student Center took over such on-campus operations. However, countless other weddings and religious services have also taken place in the chapel over its long history with WT.

The speech given by former president Joseph A. Hill at the initial dedication ceremony of his own Memorial Chapel on Oct. 21, 1950, quite eloquently expressed the chapel’s importance to WT as a whole: “Let it always be remembered that this is a place of worship. Let everyone who comes here come with an open heart into the presence of God himself.”