Yale's 1701 Founding to the 1933 Demolition of Old Brick Row: How Yale Became a University

The Yale that international students arrive at in 2026 — the soaring neo-Gothic towers of the residential colleges, the cathedral-scale Sterling Memorial Library, the hundred-foot Beinecke Rare Book Library suspended in translucent marble — is mostly less than a century old. Walk to the Yale Old Campus, the rectangular block bounded by High, Chapel, College, and Elm Streets, and step inside the gate at the southwest corner. Most of what you see — Phelps Hall, Vanderbilt Hall, Lawrance Hall, Welch Hall, the Bingham Hall dormitories — was built between 1870 and 1928. The single exception, the only building inside the Old Campus quadrangle that predates 1830, is a four-story brick rectangle on the eastern side, modest in scale, with a square cupola on the roof and unornamented brick walls. This is Connecticut Hall, built between 1750 and 1752, and it is the only surviving piece of what Yale's older alumni called Old Brick Row — a line of eight academic buildings, all built in roughly the same plain Georgian-brick vocabulary, that defined Yale's physical presence from 1750 to 1933.

The other seven buildings of Old Brick Row were demolished, deliberately and methodically, in 1933. Their demolition was not a maintenance decision. It was an institutional declaration. Yale was, by 1933, formally announcing that it had stopped being a New England Congregationalist college and had become a research university comparable to Harvard, Princeton, and Oxbridge. The neo-Gothic residential colleges that rose on the cleared ground were the new physical vocabulary of the new institutional identity. The plain brick row, which for nearly two centuries had said "Connecticut academy modestly engaged in moral education," was replaced with stone, towers, and arches that said "research university with global ambitions."

This guide walks the long institutional arc — from the 1701 founding in Saybrook through the 1716 relocation to New Haven through nearly two centuries of plain brick existence to the 1933 transformation that produced the Yale international students recognize today.

1701: The Collegiate School in Saybrook

Yale was founded as the Collegiate School in the Colony of Connecticut by a group of Connecticut Congregationalist ministers in October 1701. The founding charter authorized "a Collegiate School wherein Youth may be instructed in the Arts and Sciences who through the blessing of Almighty God may be fitted for Publick employment both in Church and Civil State." The school's purpose was to train ministers for the Connecticut Congregationalist churches and to educate the colony's elite young men for civic leadership. There was no other higher-education institution in Connecticut. Massachusetts had Harvard (founded 1636), but Connecticut Congregationalists had grown uneasy with what they perceived as theological drift there and wanted their own institution.

The school's first physical location was Saybrook, Connecticut — a coastal town at the mouth of the Connecticut River, about 30 miles east of New Haven. The first rector was Abraham Pierson, who taught the earliest students in his own home in nearby Killingworth. The Saybrook period was austere — no permanent building, classes in rented rooms, a library of donated books, enrollment of five to twenty students at any time. The school graduated its first bachelor of arts in 1702.

The Saybrook location was contentious from the start. Connecticut's politically dominant towns — Hartford, New Haven, and Saybrook itself — each wanted the school in their own jurisdiction. By 1716, with the Saybrook location producing inadequate growth and the New Haven advocates pressing aggressively, the trustees voted to move the school to New Haven. The relocation was acrimonious. Saybrook townspeople destroyed a bridge to prevent the school's library from being carted west. The library books were eventually moved by water, around the obstruction. The school reopened in New Haven in October 1716, in a small wooden building on the southwest corner of what would become the Old Campus.

1718: The Naming, the Yale Gift, and Cotton Mather

The school did not become "Yale" until two years after its arrival in New Haven. In 1718, Cotton Mather — the Boston Congregationalist minister and self-appointed promoter of New England intellectual life — wrote on the school's behalf to Elihu Yale, a wealthy English merchant and former governor of the British East India Company outpost at Madras (now Chennai). Mather suggested that a substantial gift would be commemorated by attaching the donor's name to the institution.

Elihu Yale agreed and shipped nine bales of trade goods, a portrait of King George I, and 417 books for the library. The trade goods, sold in Boston, produced approximately £560 sterling for the school's endowment. In gratitude, the trustees voted in September 1718 to rename the institution Yale College.

The historical irony is considerable. Elihu Yale never visited the school that bears his name. He never returned to North America after his English childhood departure. His gift, while substantial for 1718, was not transformative — Yale's budget covered perhaps three to five years. Yale's wealth as a colonial merchant came in significant part from his role in the East India Company's slave trade — he had personally authorized the trade in enslaved people from his Madras governorship, a fact the university has formally acknowledged in recent decades. The man whose name Yale bears was effectively a one-time donor and a slave trader whose gift represented the proceeds of imperial commerce.

The First Old Brick Row Building: Connecticut Hall, 1750-1752

For the first half-century of Yale's existence in New Haven, the college's physical plant was a collection of small wooden structures — a chapel, a "rector's house," a dining hall, scattered around the western edge of the New Haven Green. None survive. The first substantial brick building, and the building that would establish the architectural vocabulary of Yale for the next 180 years, was Connecticut Hall — built between 1750 and 1752 to provide proper student dormitory and classroom space.

Connecticut Hall was a deliberately modest building. Four stories, brick, plain Georgian style, no ornamental detailing beyond a small cupola on the roof. The architectural model was Massachusetts Hall at Harvard (built 1718-1720) — a comparable plain Georgian-brick rectangle that defined Harvard's first half-century of physical identity. Yale, in 1750, was a younger and poorer institution than Harvard, and the architectural vocabulary signaled that — Connecticut Hall was a fully serviceable academic building, but it made no claims to monumentality, classical reference, or institutional grandeur.

Connecticut Hall housed students through most of the late 18th and 19th centuries. The 1769 Yale class — the class of which Nathan Hale was a member — lived in Connecticut Hall during their college years. (Hale was hanged by the British as a spy in 1776 at age 21, having graduated from Yale in 1773, and his statue stands today on the Old Campus near Connecticut Hall.) Generations of Yale students through the 19th century slept in unheated Connecticut Hall rooms, ate in the dining commons next door, attended chapel daily, and studied a curriculum dominated by classics, mathematics, and Christian moral philosophy.

Old Brick Row at Its Maximum: Eight Buildings, 1820-1870

Through the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Yale built additional brick buildings in the same plain Georgian vocabulary, all aligned in a row along the western side of the College Street block — what alumni began calling Old Brick Row. By the early 19th century the row contained Connecticut Hall (1750-1752), South Middle College (1793), the Old Lyceum (1803), the Athenaeum (1763), the Old Chapel (1763), North Middle College (1820), South College / Berkeley Hall (1801), and Divinity College (1835).

By 1870, Old Brick Row was Yale's physical core — a single architectural project across 120 years, every building brick, four stories, plain Georgian, with the same window proportions and roof slopes. Walking the row in 1880 would have been similar to walking the brick rows at Bowdoin or Williams today — a New England academy of restrained Congregationalist architectural humility. The buildings communicated Yale as a Connecticut college, descended from the Congregationalist church-state, training young men for ministry and civic leadership.

What Yale Was, Before It Was a Research University

The institutional identity Old Brick Row physically expressed was the one Yale held from 1701 to roughly 1900. Yale was a college, not a university. The undergraduate curriculum was prescribed and largely classical — Greek, Latin, Hebrew, mathematics, natural philosophy, moral philosophy, rhetoric. The faculty was small. There were almost no graduate programs. There was no organized scientific research. The faculty's primary obligations were teaching undergraduates and providing moral guidance, not producing original scholarship.

Several specific facts make the contrast with the modern research university stark. Yale's first PhD was awarded in 1861, decades before any organized graduate research culture existed at the institution. The Sheffield Scientific School — Yale's first significant departure from the classical-college model — was founded in 1854 as a separate institution offering applied science and engineering, and was administratively distinct from Yale College until 1956. Yale Divinity School (1822) was Yale's first professional school; Yale Law (1843) and Yale Medical (1813) were institutionally minor through the 19th century. The undergraduate curriculum remained substantially prescribed through most of the 19th century. The Yale faculty in 1880 was approximately 100 people; the Yale faculty in 2026 is approximately 4,500.

Old Brick Row physically embodied this institutional reality. The buildings were teaching halls and dormitories. They contained classrooms, dining halls, chapels, and student rooms. They did not contain laboratories, libraries adequate for serious scholarship, archive vaults, or research suites. Yale in 1880 was a New England college producing roughly 200 graduates a year, and Old Brick Row was the appropriate physical statement.

The 1899-1933 Transition: Why Yale Decided to Look Different

Between roughly 1899 and 1933, Yale's institutional self-understanding changed dramatically, and the physical campus changed in lockstep. The factors driving the change were several.

Industrial wealth and donor expectations. The American Gilded Age produced enormous private fortunes, and the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Harknesses, and Sterlings looked to elite universities as institutional vehicles for permanent philanthropy. John W. Sterling, a Yale graduate of 1864, died in 1918 and left $39 million to Yale (about $700 million in present-day terms), with the explicit instruction that the gift be used for new buildings. The Sterling bequest financed the Sterling Memorial Library (1930), the Sterling Law Building (1931), the Sterling Hall of Medicine, and several residential colleges. Donors of Sterling's stature wanted their gifts memorialized in monumental architecture, not in modest brick boxes.

The Harvard model. Harvard had begun rebuilding its campus in monumental classical-revival and Georgian-revival styles in the 1890s. By 1920, Harvard Yard was substantially rebuilt and communicated institutional ambition at a scale Yale's plain brick row visually conceded. Yale's leadership under presidents Arthur Twining Hadley (1899-1921) and James Rowland Angell (1921-1937) saw the architectural gap as a competitive problem.

The shift to research-university identity. By the 1910s and 1920s, Yale was visibly becoming a research university. The graduate school enrolled hundreds of doctoral students, professional schools were expanding, the faculty was increasingly expected to produce original scholarship. The institutional identity had outgrown the physical plant.

The Collegiate Gothic project. Beginning around 1900, Yale began commissioning new buildings in Collegiate Gothic — a style explicitly modeled on Oxford and Cambridge medieval architecture, designed to communicate the new university's claim to be a peer of the English ancient universities. Phelps Hall (1896) established the vocabulary. Sterling Memorial Library (1930), a cathedral-scale Gothic library by James Gamble Rogers, was the most ambitious single building Yale ever commissioned and remains the central architectural statement of the campus.

By 1930, Yale had a problem. The new Collegiate Gothic buildings were rising on land immediately adjacent to Old Brick Row. The plain Georgian-brick row was visually conceding to the new neo-Gothic monumentality. The trustees concluded that Old Brick Row had to go.

1933: The Demolitions

The demolitions of Old Brick Row occurred in 1932-1933 as part of the construction of the residential colleges. South Middle College, North Middle College, South College, and Divinity College were all demolished. Their footprint was largely absorbed into Branford College, Saybrook College, and Pierson College, the first three of the original residential colleges, which opened in autumn 1933. The decision to demolish Connecticut Hall was actively considered — the building was structurally aging and architecturally inconsistent with the new Gothic vocabulary — but the trustees ultimately decided to preserve it as the only Yale building predating 1800.

The aesthetic argument made by the demolition's defenders was that Old Brick Row was institutionally outmoded — that Yale was no longer the Congregationalist academy the brick row represented and that a research university comparable to Oxford and Princeton needed appropriate physical expression. The aesthetic argument made by the demolition's critics was that Yale was destroying its own architectural history to mimic an English collegiate tradition Yale did not actually share. Both arguments were correct. The demolition was an act of deliberate institutional self-reinvention, and the new architecture was a self-conscious adoption of an Oxbridge vocabulary that Yale's actual institutional descent did not naturally produce.

The result, ninety-three years later, is the Yale campus that international students see when they arrive. Connecticut Hall sits at the eastern edge of the Old Campus, the only building inside the quadrangle predating 1820, looking distinctly out of place against its Collegiate Gothic neighbors. The neo-Gothic residential colleges immediately to the west and south of the Old Campus — Branford College and Saybrook College, which share a single building separated by an interior wall, plus Pierson, Davenport, Calhoun-now-Hopper, and Jonathan Edwards — define Yale's contemporary architectural identity. The cathedral-scale Sterling Memorial Library a block north anchors the campus.

What the Architecture Means Now

For an international student walking the Yale campus in 2026, the architectural narrative is legible if you know what to look for. The neo-Gothic stone and stained glass and arched courtyards are not "ancient" — they are about ninety years old, deliberately designed to evoke an Oxbridge tradition Yale claimed institutional kinship with rather than direct descent from. The plain brick of Connecticut Hall, easily missed in the Old Campus visual richness, is the actual ancient core — 274 years old, the only physical link to the Yale that was a Connecticut Congregationalist college.

The 1933 demolitions are themselves the moment when Yale stopped being one kind of institution and started being another. Before 1933, Yale was visibly a New England academy, modestly funded, training young men for ministry, civic leadership, and the professions. After 1933, Yale was visibly a research university, ambitiously funded by industrial wealth, claiming peerage with Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Princeton. The architecture changed because the institution changed. The physical campus is the documentary record of a 232-year arc, with the breakpoint visible in stone.

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