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The Tale of Yale's Governor Ingersoll House
A
home on Quality Row has known a host of Yale uses.
December
2001
by Judith Ann Schiff
Judith
Ann Schiff is Chief Research Archivist at the Yale University Library.
The
last remaining Greek
Revival residence of the imposing stretch of Elm Street known
as Quality Row faces the New
Haven Green at the corner of Elm and Temple streets. Since 1830
the Yale-connected occupants of the Governor Ingersoll House have
played significant roles in the fields of law, public service, medicine,
publishing, and currently music.
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The
history of the last remaining Greek Revival residence on
Quality Row.
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The
stately house was built by Ralph Isaacs Ingersoll, Class of 1808,
whose Yale roots extended back to Jonathan Ingersoll, Class of 1736.
A successful New Haven lawyer, Ingersoll was elected to the U.S.
Congress after serving as representative and Speaker of the Connecticut
General Assembly from 1819 to 1825. In 1829 he decided to build
a new home along Quality Row and chose as his architects Ithiel
Town and Alexander Jackson Davis, who had recently established
in New York the first professional architectural practice in America.
The Ingersoll site was across the street from Town's buildings on
the Green, including Trinity
and Center
churches, and the then-state capitol.
In Congress
Ingersoll was so conspicuous a debater on the Democratic side that
his associates and the press called him "Young Hotspur."
While in office he also served as mayor of New Haven from 1830 to
1831. When fellow Democrat President Andrew Jackson visited New
Haven in 1833 Ingersoll welcomed him to his new home. (The president
must have liked what he saw, for during Jackson's term in office,
the architects' designs were selected for the U.
S. Custom House in New York and the U.S. Patent Office.) Ingersoll
decided to return to his private law practice in 1833, leaving it
only to serve at President Polk's request as Minister to the Court
of St. Petersburg, 1846 to 1848.
His
son Charles Roberts Ingersoll graduated from Yale College in 1840
and from the law school in 1844. He became his father's law partner
and also served frequently in the state legislature. A year after
his father's death in 1872 he was elected governor of Connecticut,
and from that time his home became known as the Governor Ingersoll
house. He was reelected annually until 1877 when he declined nomination;
in 1874 Yale awarded Ingersoll an honorary LLD degree. After the
Governor's death in 1903, his house came into the possession of
Frank Hamilton Whittemore (whose grandmother was an Ingersoll) and
his son Edward Reed Whittemore, Class of 1898, who were both physicians.
World
War I led to a new role for the Governor's House. In May 1917 Lieutenant
Earl Trumbull Williams, Class of 1910, of the Field Artillery died
in an accident while on a short leave from Camp Devens, Massachusetts.
He left substantial bequests to the University and the alumni fund,
and in 1918 a memorial gift of $100,000 from his mother was used
to purchase and remodel the house for the Yale
University Press. The building was renovated by Delano
and Aldrich in 1919 and named the Earl Trumbull Williams Memorial.
When the Press relocated to York Street in 1960, the house became
a Yale office building known simply as 143 Elm that is now the home
of the department
of music.
For
alumni, however, the Governor Ingersoll House's greatest moment
came in June 1919, when at the invitation of Williams's mother,
it served as the Class of 1910 headquarters for the great World
War Victory Reunion. Over five days the class slept there, held
their Class Dinner, and set a record for hospitality to all the
Yale classes who gathered at their open house.
It
was, said Williams's classmate Meade
Minnigerode, "The apotheosis of Yale's old-time reunions,
never to be seen again."  |
