Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)/New Haven
NEW HAVEN, a city and county-seat of New Haven co., Conn., at the head of New Haven Bay, an excellent harbor 4 miles long that sets in northwardly from Long Island Sound. The city is located on the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroad, 73 miles N. E. of New York City, and about 36 miles S. of Hartford. The city is the largest and most important in the State and is rapidly increasing in population and in industrial importance. It is also the home of Yale University.
New Haven has a great variety of manufacturing interests, most of them being of standard goods such as firearms and ammunition; rubber shoes, tires, and other rubber goods; household and builders' hardware, clocks and watches, cutlery, electric elevators, sewing machine attachments, dies, safes, paper wares and boxes, caskets, pianos, organs, silk, etc. New Haven has the general offices of the N. Y., N. H. & H. R. R. Co. The city is a great distributing point to and from all New England. The waters of the sound give New Haven water transportation facilities. A good harbor with a 20-foot channel and two steamboat lines for passenger and freight to New York afford shippers good means of transportation.
The assessed valuation of property in New Haven in 1920 was more than $200,000,000. The city has more than 200 miles of streets, most of them well paved. The city's water supply is stored in five lakes to the W., N. and E. of the city, aggregating 900 acres of water with a watershed of 6,600 acres surrounding them. The public school system is comprehensive with an enrolment of about 29,000 pupils. The annual cost of maintaining the city government is about $3,500,000.
In addition to Yale University the city 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, several 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.