Connecticut Hall, the Georgian building on Yale's Old Campus, was completed in 1752 as a student dormitory. Completed in 1752, it began life as a student dormitory and kept that role for 200 years. After 1905 part of the first floor became home to the Yale College Dean’s Office, and in the mid-twentieth century the full building was converted to departmental offices.
Today it is used by the Department of Philosophy, and its third story contains a room for meetings of the Yale Faculty of Arts & Sciences. Connecticut Hall is the third-oldest of only seven surviving American colonial-era college buildings, and the second-oldest structure built for Yale College in New Haven. It was built, in part, by slaves.
It was the first building in a campus plan known as Old Brick Row, which stood from 1750 to 1870, and it is the only survivor of the demolition campaign that created the modern Old Campus quadrangle. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965. When Yale College moved to New Haven in 1718, the town had constructed a wooden College House nearby.
Picture Old Brick Row's vanished companions as you cross the Old Campus quadrangle, this hall the only one still standing from that 1750 to 1870 row.