New Hampshire College
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
an is the home of the Hopkins Grammar School (the oldest preparatory school in the United States), the Gateway School (for girls), Hamden Hall (for boys), a Training School for Nurses, a Boardman Apprentice Shops School, a State Normal Training School, business colleges, a Normal School of Gymnastics, etc. The city also contains large Protestant and Roman Catholic orphan asylums, has a Home for the Aged, a Public Dispensary, a Home for the Friendless, three large public hospitals, the famous Ives Memorial Library, a County Court House in marble of classical design costing $1,250,000; a Federal Building and Postoffice, costing $1,600,000; and Yale Bowl, an athletic field structure of concrete and steel with a seating capacity for 61,000 people. In the Bowl the great annual athletic contests between Yale and Princeton and Yale and Harvard are held. New Haven is developing into the largest railroad transfer point in New England, the railroad system having in process of construction at Cedar Hill a freight classification yard for New England of about 1,000 acres, with more than 10 miles of trackage constructed in 1920. New Haven was settled in 1638 by a company from London, under the Rev. John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton. It formed a separate colony till, in 1662, it was united to the Connecticut colony. On July 5, 1779, it was captured and plundered by the British under General Tryon. After the Revolutionary War commerce increased rapidly, but was greatly crippled by the Embargo Act and the War of 1812. New Haven received its charter in 1784, and prior to 1873 was one of the State capitals. Pop. (1900) 108,027; (1910) 133,605; (1920) 162,537.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The text printed under this heading in Collier's 1921 is in fact a stray passage about New Haven, Connecticut; the institution itself was the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts at Durham, which became the University of New Hampshire in 1923 and now enrolls well over ten thousand students. Of the New Haven material, much has moved on: Connecticut abolished county government in 1960, so the marble County Court House no longer serves a county administration, and Hopkins Grammar School (now simply Hopkins School) admitted girls in the 1970s. Yale Bowl still stands but seats about 61,000 in name only for a Yale-Harvard game that no longer draws a national audience, and the city's population, 162,537 in 1920, peaked around 1950 and has since fallen back to roughly the same figure it reported a century ago. The Cedar Hill yard that was to make New Haven "the largest railroad transfer point in New England" was largely wound down as freight traffic shifted to trucks.
Written for this edition, 2026.