The observatory took shape during a period when the University of Alabama was investing in serious scientific equipment. Professor Frederick A.P. Barnard began ordering custom apparatus from London and Paris as early as 1838, warning trustees that the instruments were costly and might take years to acquire. The Greek Revival building was completed in 1844 with a central observation room capped by a revolving dome. At the west end, a transit instrument room featured a north-south slit in the roof for tracking celestial objects as they crossed the meridian. The prized equatorial-mounted Troughton and Simms refracting telescope was not installed under the dome until 1849, along with a transit circle readable to a single arc second. For an institution on the American frontier, it was a remarkable commitment to astronomy.

By 1865, the University of Alabama had been converted into a military campus, training Confederate officers. General John Croxton's Federal cavalry raid on April 4 of that year, just five days before Lee's surrender at Appomattox, was thorough and devastating. Troops burned nearly every structure on campus. The observatory survived, though it suffered extensive damage. Alongside it, only the President's Mansion (built in 1841), Gorgas House (1829), and the Little Round House (1860) escaped the flames. In the weeks that followed, the battered observatory served as a makeshift storage facility for books, records, and equipment salvaged from the surrounding ruins. The telescope parts taken as souvenirs never returned.

The building spent more than a century known simply as the Old Observatory, a relic of the prewar campus amid the modern university growing around it. In 1985, it was renamed Maxwell Hall in honor of Frederick R. Maxwell, a retired consulting engineer who had dedicated himself to protecting and preserving what remained of the original 1800s campus. The name change signaled a new chapter. Maxwell Hall went on to house the Computer Based Honors Program and later the university's Creative Campus initiative. Today it is home to the Collaborative Arts Research Initiative, an institution devoted to interdisciplinary creative work -- a fitting second life for a building originally designed to look outward at the universe.

The observatory sits within a campus now dotted with historical landmarks: Foster Auditorium, Denny Chimes, the Gorgas-Manly Historic District. But Maxwell Hall holds a particular distinction as one of the oldest surviving structures, a direct physical link to the antebellum university that predates the Civil War's devastation. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places and documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey, the building has been studied and preserved as an artifact of both Southern academic history and Greek Revival architecture. Its dome no longer rotates, and no telescope peers through its roof, but the building endures -- repurposed, renamed, and still in use nearly two centuries after it was built.