Jubilee Hall

Stephen D. Hatch, a New York architect, designed the building, which went up between 1873 and 1876 as a six-story L-shaped Gothic Revival block with an open octagonal belfry. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1974. A floor-to-ceiling portrait of the original Jubilee Singers, a gift from Queen Victoria after the 1873 tour, hangs inside, though the interior was long ago modernized for dormitory use and the hall remains an undergraduate residence. Another marker, for the Singers, was added nearby in 2017.

What the plaque says

Jubilee Hall Erected in 1876, Jubilee Hall was the first permanent structure built on the Fisk University campus. Named for Fisk's world-famous Jubilee Singers, this Victorian Gothic structure is sometimes called "frozen music." Jubilee Hall is a National Historic Landmark and a memorial to the spirituals and the singers who sang them.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — steps away
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• Tennessee State Capitol — 1.2 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 1.4 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• National Museum of African American Music — 1.6 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.

More markers nearby

• Fisk Jubilee Singers — steps away
• The John Wesley Work Home — steps away
• Desegregating Nashville's Lunch Counters — steps away
• Fisk Memorial Chapel — steps away