While the repairs were carried out, classes were held in the President's House and in the Professor's House, then occupied by the professor of math and chemistry, John Maclean Sr., and his family.

A fund-raising campaign was launched. In a general appeal to the inhabitants of the United States -- a sort of 19th-century form of direct-mail solicitation -- Joseph Bloomfield, the Governor of New Jersey and President ex officio of the Board of Trustees, made a plea for donations:

"The fair edifice, erected by the liberality and consecrated by the prayers of our pious and public-spirited predecessors, was totally consumed and three thousand volumes of valuable books, with much private property of the students, perished in the flames. Under this inauspicious and afflictive event, which the providence of a holy God has permitted to take place, we are humbled and mourn. But can we, ought we, so far as to despond, as to suffer the establishment to become extinct? No..." Bloomfield shrewdly targeted his appeal for help to "friends of religion," followed by friends of science, friends of civil liberty, alumni of the College, and the "wealthy and benevolent of every description."

Support was prompt, widespread, and generous. Many people apparently held with the views of an anonymous New Englander, who was moved to verse:

"Wrapt in a blaze the sumptious mansion falls/Leaving no vestige but the tottering walls/but may the lib'ral sons of Jersey raise/...another Phoenix structure." By April 1803, the Trustees reported that their fund-raising campaign had been so successful that not only could Nassau Hall be rebuilt, but two new buildings could be constructed as well. Brought in to supervise the project was one of America's first professionally trained architects, the British-born Benjamin Latrobe of Philadelphia.