Benefactors Expand Yale

Women, through their carefully planned, generous gifts, enabled Yale to fulfill its mission to educate contributors to many areas of society. They brought music to New Haven, facilities for the modern study of geology, a tuberculosis sanitarium and chest clinic, and a model college quadrangle with an iconic tower that has become the landmark of Yale and New Haven.

The Yale Summer School of Music, with its Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, was a highly visible gift to the university from the late Ellen Battell Stoeckel (1851–1939). Less well known is the role that the Battell family, particularly its women, played in initiating and supporting music education at Yale.

Ellen Battell Stoeckel, donor of the Norfolk Summer School of Music and Art, and her husband Carl, circa 1890s.

The Battells of Norfolk were famous for their musical talents. Robbins Battell, B.A. 1839, was an accomplished composer and performer. His sister Irene—organist, choral conductor, and acclaimed singer—moved to New Haven in 1843, as the bride of Professor William A. Larned, B.A. 1826, and enriched its music culture. In the 1870s she persuaded her brother Joseph to fund an instructorship in sacred music for Gustave Stoeckel, the first European-trained music teacher in the city, and the construction of Battell Chapel to serve as Yale's concert hall and to showcase her gift of its organ. Irene and her sister Urania endowed a music fund, and in 1889 Ellen gave $20,000 so the fund could endow a chair in music.

Lucy Hall Boardman (1819-1906), after 1883

Mrs. Lucy H. Boardman (1819–1906) donated Kirtland Hall in 1902. A longtime widow—she was the wife of William Whiting Boardman, B.A. 1812, a Connecticut state senator and U.S. Congressman who died in 1871—she lived at 46 Hillhouse Avenue, devoting her time to charitable projects. Her major endowments included Trinity Church on the New Haven Green; St. Luke’s Church; the YWCA; the Home for the Friendless, renamed in 1966 in honor of her sister Mary Wade; and Yale University. Mrs. Boardman is best known to old New Haveners as the donor of the Boardman Trade School in 1894, later joined to Hillhouse High School, on the site of Ezra Stiles College.

Kirtland Hall was given as a memorial to her uncle, Jared Potter Kirtland, M.D. 1815, a noted naturalist and member of the first class to graduate from the Yale Medical School. The Neo-Renaissance building of East Haven brownstone housed the Department of Geology until 1963, when it became the home of the Department of Psychology.

Kirtland Hall at 2 Hillhouse Avenue, circa 1970s

Sarah L. Pardee Winchester (1839-1922), circa 1865

Sarah Winchester, the widow of William Wirt Winchester, endowed the Winchester Hospital. Originally dedicated to the care of patients with tuberculosis, it has evolved into the present-day Winchester Center for Lung Disease at Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Winchester’s husband, was the principal owner of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company in New Haven. In the years following his death from tuberculosis in 1881, she moved to California and over time built a sprawling mansion in San Jose that became a tourist attraction after her death. As a memorial to her husband, with funds entrusted to Yale, Sarah Winchester endowed the William Wirt Winchester Hospital in 1909. Leased by the military after World Wars I and II, the building became a veterans hospital affiliated with the medical school in 1953.

In a letter to the president of the General Hospital Society dated November 6, 1909, Sarah expressed her interest “in founding of some worthy and enduring memorial of my late husband, William Wirt Winchester,” sending a check for $300,000 the following month, to be used to fund “an institution for the treatment of tuberculosis.”

An abstract of Winchester's correspondence detailing her gift to the General Hospital Society.

The iconic Harkness Tower in the Memorial Quadrangle has become a landmark of Yale and New Haven.

Mrs. Anna Harkness endowed the Memorial Quadrangle, now Branford and Saybrook colleges, in memory of her son Charles, B.A. 1883, who died in 1916. A major shareholder in the Standard Oil Company, she established the Commonwealth Fund with her son Edward S. Harkness, B.A. 1897, who later funded the Yale residential college system. In 1920 she gave an additional $3 million gift to Yale for faculty salaries.

Mary Stillman Harkness, with her husband Edward S. Harkness, donated the Gutenberg Bible to Yale in 1926 in memory of her mother-in-law, Anna Harkness. The bible and the portrait below were displayed in the exhibition room in Sterling Memorial Library’s Rare Book Room. After the bible was relocated to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in 1963, the Medical School requested her portrait for permanent display in the Harkness Auditorium. 

Mary Stillman Harkness (1874–1950), 1933