ND Home Football Weekends
The Trumpets perform at 4:00 inside the Golden Dome on Friday and after the Concert on the Steps (before Step-off) on Saturday of all home Irish football games. These performances are not to be missed!

Notre Dame’s Golden Dome is the most recognized college
landmark in the world, but it’s not the first building to occupy this
site.

Father Sorin’s first main building, like Sacred Heart, proved
too small. The second one (actually an addition to the first)
suffered a terrible fire in April 1879. The roof was engulfed in
flames, and by the time the first bucket of water reached the
building, the statue of Mary was falling through the original tin
dome. The fire gutted most of the adjacent campus buildings
except for the church and a few outbuildings. Father Sorin was on
his way to France at the time of the fire, but word was sent to him
in Montreal and he returned to campus. After surveying the
smoldering remains that were once his dream, he gathered the
whole community in Sacred Heart and told them: “If it were ALL
gone, I should not give up.” That day he recruited a crew of about
300 people, many of them volunteers, who worked 15 to 18 hours
a day, seven days a week, through the entire summer. Within four
months, they had the present structure up and functional in time for the students returning that fall. (The wings and dome were completed between 1882 and 1884.)

However, Father Sorin was still not satisfied with the new structure. He declare: “We will not cease until we place a great golden dome atop it, and above that the statue of Our Lady, so that everyone who passes this way can look up and see why this place succeeds.” The committee governing University finances protested, so Father Sorin, using his position as superior general of the Holy Cross order, made himself chairman of the committee. He fled campus when the committee met until they gave in to his demand; the dome has been gilded ever since.

Today a statue of Mary, Our Lady (“Notre Dame”), rises above the campus. The statue was a gift from neighboring Saint Mary’s College, and is 16 feet tall and weighs over two tons. Both the statue of Mary and the dome are covered in 23-karat gold leaf, which is regilded every 20 to 30 years. The new Main Building recently completed a massive $58 million interior restoration, begun in 1997. All decor was restored to original plans, and the structure was brought up to current building code standards.