Yale Alumni Magazine: The Irony of Woodbridge Hal (Summer 2001)

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The Irony of Woodbridge Hall
Summer 2001
by Judith Ann Schiff

Judith Ann Schiff is Chief Research Archivist at the Yale University Library.

Students of irony will appreciate this one: The man for whom Woodbridge Hall, the administrative heart of the University, was named once led a faction among the trustees to have the Collegiate School settled in Hartford. The Reverend Timothy Woodbridge’s failure in the early part of the 18th century was certainly New Haven’s gain.

The man for whom Yale’s administration building was named was not at first a New Haven fan.

The 80-by-40 foot, three-story limestone building named in his honor has an interesting history, for the planning and construction of Woodbridge Hall was the key element of the University’s Bicentennial plans. At the beginning of the 20th century Yale was about to reach two major goals, the completion of the Old Campus Quadrangle and the creation of a new quadrangle that provided vital University services and would link the liberal arts campus with the science campus. From the Civil War on, new dormitories and classroom buildings had been constructed around the Old Brick Row. By the time of the Bicentennial, the University hoped to raze the old buildings in the Row’s center, except for Connecticut Hall. Only one important obstacle remained: the Treasury Building that stood between the Row and the Old Library. Built in 1832 as the Trumbull Gallery, it had been converted into an administration building in 1868 after the completion of the new art gallery, Street Hall.

In the fall of 1899, shortly after Anson Phelps Stokes, Class of 1896, was named Yale’s secretary, he invited his aunts Olivia and Caroline Phelps Stokes to visit him in New Haven. The Stokes sisters were among the first American women philanthropists, and they principally supported projects for women’s causes, the education of African Americans and Native Americans, and the improvement of housing for the poor.

Aunts Carrie and Olivia quickly responded to Anson’s appeal for a new administration building by agreeing to fund it entirely, with the stipulation that Anson’s brother, the architect and urban housing reformer, Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, design it. They also requested that the Georgian building be named in memory of their ancestors—Woodbridge, a Hartford minister and a 1675 graduate of Harvard who was one of the founders of Yale College; John Haynes, the first governor of the colony of Connecticut; and George Wyllys, governor of the colony in 1642.

Ultimately, Timothy Woodbridge would turn out to be an appropriate namesake for the administration building, the first of the Bicentennial structures to be completed. To be sure, Woodbridge’s background was similar to that of Elihu Yale. Both men had fathers who came to New England in the 1630s, and after marrying Boston women, both returned to England in the 1650s during Cromwell’s Puritan protectorate. However, unlike Yale, who was born in America and remained in England, Woodbridge was born in England and came to America with his family when the monarchy was restored.

But this founding fellow of Yale, a devout Hartford minister, was so opposed to its move to New Haven that, as a protest in 1718, he held a separate commencement in Wethersfield. Had Woodbridge succeeded, of course, Yale’s history would have been quite different, but in time, he relented, serving as acting president in the 1720s and remaining a fellow until his death in 1732.

At the building’s dedication during the Bicentennial celebration in October 1901, the beloved author Donald Grant Mitchell, Class of 1841, prophetically expressed the hope “that the glow of a hundred other Octobers may mellow the tone of this marble hall … Long may it last, poised here mid-way between the groups of offices dedicated to science, and those others, southward, dedicated to letters and the humanities!”




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