Yale was named for a merchant whose gift was nine bales of goods
In 1718 Cotton Mather asked Elihu Yale, a Boston-born merchant who had grown rich in Madras running the East India Company's Fort St. George, to fund a building for a struggling Connecticut college. Yale sent nine bales of goods, which sold for more than £560. Mather suggested renaming the school in his honour.
Connecticut's General Court passed an act on 9 October 1701 to set up a Collegiate School to educate ministers and lay leaders. Ten Congregational ministers, all Harvard graduates and led by James Pierpont, gathered in Branford to donate books for its library. Classes began in the Killingworth home of the first rector, Abraham Pierson, and in 1702 Nathaniel Chauncey earned the first degree by oral examination. After Pierson died the school moved to Saybrook in 1707, and in 1716 trustees voted to relocate to New Haven, which had outbid rival towns.
The Mathers backed the school partly out of a feud at Harvard, where Increase Mather thought his colleagues had grown theologically lax, hoping the Connecticut college would guard Puritan orthodoxy. The plan backfired in one respect. A shipment of 500 books arrived in 1714, gathered from 180 prominent English intellectuals, and young Jonathan Edwards found John Locke there. In 1722 the rector and six friends announced they had abandoned Calvinism and joined the Church of England.
Ezra Stiles, president from 1778 to 1795, required every freshman to learn Hebrew and put the Hebrew words Urim and Thummim on the seal. His worst moment came in 1779, when British troops occupied New Haven and threatened to burn the college; alumnus Edmund Fanning, secretary to the commanding British general, talked them out of it. As Connecticut's only college until 1823, Yale taught the sons of the elite and punished card-playing and tavern visits. Its report of 1828 defended the Latin and Greek curriculum against demands for more science and modern languages.
Yale awarded America's first PhD in 1861 and became a university in name in 1887. Alumni include five US presidents and 19 Supreme Court justices. Its library holds more than 15 million volumes, and its endowment stood at $44.1 billion in 2025.
Source: Yale University
