By the end of the nineteenth century, the Queens Campus contained seven buildings designed by architects John McComb, Jr., Nicholas Wyckoff, Williard Smith, Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, and Van Campen Taylor.

These buildings were erected to accommodate the small but expanding liberal arts college's classroom instruction, student activities, faculty offices, chapel, library, and housing into the middle of the twentieth century.

Six buildings remain and are used to accommodate the university's core administrative offices, a geological museum, the college chapel, and a former astronomical observatory that is no longer used.

[4][6] Positioned on the hilltop above the Raritan, Hamilton's artillery slowed the British advance and afforded Washington sufficient time to escape.

[9] A few years after receiving its charter in 1766, Queen's College began holding classes in a local tavern and students boarded at houses in the city.[10]: p.84 [11]: p.10ff.

[12]: p.26 In 1807, Perth Amboy merchant John Parker bequeathed a six-acre apple orchard on a hill in New Brunswick to the trustees of Queen's College.

[11]: p.24  With a successful fundraising effort, obtaining the support of the Reformed Church's Synod of New York, and with Parker's donation of the six-acre apple orchard tract, Queen's College was reopened.

[11]: pp.36–41  In 1830, the grammar school moved to a building across College Avenue, built by Nicholas Wyckoff, now known as Alexander Johnston Hall.

[11]: p.310 [14] In the 1860s, Rutgers began expanding with the addition of science, engineering, military, and agricultural education as New Jersey's sole land grant college, and with substantial financial support and donations.

[17] In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Rutgers expanded its student body, and built a larger campus in New Brunswick—starting with library (1903), gymanisum, and additional classroom buildings on the Voorhees Mall.

The university would continue to expand in New Brunswick, Piscataway, and surrounding communities with the addition of land that is now the College Avenue, Busch, Livingston, Cook, Douglass campuses.

Henry Rutgers donated funds to reopen the school in the form of a $5,000 bond, and gave a bell that was placed in the cupola of Old Queens.

Janeway, an 1863 alumnus of the college, provided a collection of casts, marble, lithographs, and photographs with a focus on classical archaeology that illustrated "the topography, art, life, and literature of Ancient Greece and Rome.

"[21] The building was razed after sustaining considerable damage during the Great Atlantic hurricane which made landfall in the New York City area in September 1944.

"[12]: p.14 [21] The building featured two large rooms on its first floor which were used by the school's two literary societies, Peithessophian and Philoclean which were significant in campus life in the nineteenth century.

"[21] The first floor at this time had been renovated to house the college's history faculty and a chapter of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA).

[11]: pp.87–91  Rutgers named the building after New York City businessman, Daniel S. Schanck, who donated a large portion of the funds to construct and equip the observatory.

"[17][23] The Schanck Observatory served as the university's first astronomical facility and was used to provide instruction to its students through the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Hardenbergh's design called initially for a Gothic Revival style brick building, although it was revised to use brownstone, a cheaper alternative.

[25] It features exhibits on geology, paleontology, and anthropology, with an emphasis on the natural history of New Jersey, that include fluorescent zinc minerals from Franklin and Ogdensburg, a dinosaur trackway discovered in Towaco, a mastodon from Salem County, and a Ptolemaic era Egyptian mummy.

"[4] One author described the interior of the chapel as "exceedingly beautiful, having a roof of open timber, finished in black walnut and stained pine, resting for its center support on slender iron columns painted to correspond with the delicately tinted walls.

It is also used for university events including convocation, concerts, alumni and faculty weddings, funerals, and often as the site of lectures by prominent intellectuals and world leaders.

During his ten-year tenure as Rutgers College's sixth president during the 1840s, Abraham Bruyn Hasbrouck (1791–1879) began planting and caring for "many of the noble trees that now adorn the campus.

In front of the cannon is a plaque given in 1949 by the Rutgers College class of 1924 in memory of three military servicemen who died in World War II.