Manasseh Cutler was a New England minister, physician, and botanist who, in 1787, helped negotiate the Northwest Ordinance and personally drafted the Ohio University charter in 1804. He never lived in Ohio. The building bearing his name was designed by Rufus Putnam - the Revolutionary War general who led the Ohio Company of Associates to settle Marietta and who, in March 1812, was asked to draft a plan for a permanent academic edifice on the Athens campus. Putnam was joined by Benjamin Corp, an architect from Marietta, who handled the detailed design in the Federal style then dominant in American public buildings. Construction was slow - the country was in the middle of the War of 1812, money was scarce, and Athens was a frontier settlement. The unfinished structure was struck by lightning during an August 1818 storm; the architect later wrote that providence had spared the building from fire only because the unfinished walls were soaked through with rain.

The building was completed in 1819 at a final cost of $17,806 - a substantial sum for the time, but modest compared to the half-century earlier construction of any comparable East Coast college building. The cupola housed a large cast-iron bell, rung for the first time that year, believed to have been cast in either London or Boston (records are uncertain). Cutler Hall went into use as a combined dormitory, laboratory, classroom, and presidential office. For the next forty years it was substantially the whole university. In 1837, Wilson Hall went up to its left; in 1839, McGuffey Hall to its right. The trio of red-brick Federal-style buildings that today defines the College Green's western edge took shape over a quarter-century, with Cutler always at center.

The roof was raised about three feet in 1882, giving the building a slightly different silhouette for sixty-seven years. In 1937 the interior was thoroughly modernized, with metal staircases and an elevator added to allow continued administrative use. In 1949 the roof was restored to its original 1819 line, which is what stands today. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark and has been continuously occupied for over two hundred years - it now houses the Office of the President and the senior administrative offices of the university, including the provost and vice presidents. Generations of student photographs on the building's stone steps - graduation, commencement, organization promotions - have accumulated into a kind of visual record of every Ohio University class since the invention of photography.

Cutler Hall's chimes ring the Westminster Quarters every fifteen minutes - the same tune that comes from Big Ben in London, the most familiar campanile pattern in the English-speaking world. The chimes are heard across the College Green and the surrounding streets of uptown Athens. On Founder's Day, the alma mater plays at a time that matches the university's age, a count that increases by one minute each year. The ritual functions as a useful answer to the question of how old this institution actually is: just listen for the bells on February 18 and count. It is the kind of inheritance a campus accumulates only when it has been continuously occupied for the long haul, in a place that has kept choosing to keep the old building rather than tear it down.

From the air, Cutler Hall reads as the visual anchor of the College Green: a three-story red-brick building with a white cupola and a flagpole, set among large oaks and elms on the green's western edge. Wilson Hall stands to its left, McGuffey Hall to its right, the three buildings forming a Federal-style composition unusual in its completeness. Court Street's commercial corridor runs one block north. The Hocking River curves around campus to the east. From cruising altitude, the whole campus reads as a compact ensemble of red brick and green lawn, with Cutler at the center, the building from which the chimes have been carrying across two centuries of Athens, Ohio.