Silliman College

Silliman College is a residential college at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, named for scientist and Yale professor Benjamin Silliman. It opened in September 1940 as the last of the original ten residential colleges, and contains buildings constructed as early as 1901.Silliman is Yale's largest residential college by its footprint, occupying most of a city block. Due to its size, the college is able to house its freshmen in the college instead of on Yale's Old Campus. The college's architecture is eclectic: though architect Otto Eggers completed most of the college with Georgian buildings, the college also incorporates two early-20th century buildings in the French Renaissance and Gothic Revival styles.The College has links to Harvard's Pforzheimer House and Dudley House, as well as Trinity College, Cambridge and Brasenose College, Oxford. Its rival college at Yale is Timothy Dwight College, located directly across Temple Street.HistoryThe oldest known settlement at the present-day site of the college was the farm of Robert Newman, whose barn hosted the meeting that incorporated the Colony of New Haven in 1639. The tract later became one of the blocks of New Haven's original nine-square city plan. Yale's first buildings on the site were for the Sheffield Scientific School. Byers Hall, a three-story building of Indiana limestone, was built in 1903 and designed by Hiss and Weekes architects in the modified French Renaissance Style. The Vanderbilt-Sheffield dormitory, a five-story building of the same material, was built between 1903 and 1906 by architect Charles C. Haight in the Gothic Revival style.