Donald Grant Mitchell's Edgewood Estate
By Sam Jensen In the year of 1837, at the young age of fifteen, Donald Grant Mitchell’s romance with New Haven began with his arrival at Yale College. Mitchell was, from the beginning, enthralled by the architectural beauty of the city, and the nature which surrounded and complemented it as a whole. In Waldo Dunn’s biography of Mitchell, the scene of his arrival to New Haven is depicted in detail. Dunn writes, “We of the present need, perhaps, to be reminded of the New Haven and the Yale of 1837… New Haven was then an isolated town of some 13,000 inhabitants—a kind of backwoods Athens. Not until two years later was railway connection with the outside world established… Even prior to 1837, however, the beauty-loving zeal of James Hillhouse had been instrumental in transforming New Haven into the ‘City of Elms,’ ” (Dunn, 43). Having arrived before heavy industrialization, Mitchell’s Yale days were set in a more quiet and quaint City of Elms than it had become by the end of his life.
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