Architecture
The organization is housed in a structure acquired by the Society in 1911 which looks out on the New Haven Green. The three-story colonial-era white clapboard house is, in fact, the oldest of all Yale's secret society buildings, and purportedly one of the oldest original structures in the United States still in regular use. Its brick basement is older still, constructed in the early 17th century, and later frequented by colonists sympathetic to the English cause when it became known as the Tory Tavern, a central locale of the Revolutionary War. Following the War, the town of New Haven confiscated the building from its Loyalist owner for his activities.
The building has also been expanded to the rear several times. During the demonstrations and student strikes associated with the New Haven Black Panther trials and other civil unrest in 1970, numbers of the twelve thousand protesters at times found refuge inside the Elihu building.
The building is among the largest of the societies, belying the modest clapboard facade, and contains two single guest rooms in addition to beds for all the current undergraduate members, as well as a large formal meeting room, a library, formal dining room, and an informal 'tap room' in the basement. The club also has a section of the old Yale Fence in its basement, a relic from the famous structure removed in 1888.
Another tradition on campus is that Elihu contains original papers of the author James Fenimore Cooper, even drafts of his epic novel The Last of the Mohicans, in its collection. (Author Cooper wasn't a member of Elihu as he was expelled from Yale in 1805, a century before the society was founded.)
Read more about this topic: Elihu (secret Society)
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider, and should be wise in season and not fetter himself with duties which will embitter his days and spoil him for his proper work.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)