James Dwight Dana House

Perched upon the “Triangle Lot” formed by Hillhouse Avenue, Trumbull St., and the old Farmington Canal, the James Dwight Dana House has stood as one of New Haven’s finest Italianate villas since its 1849 design by Henry Austin, among the foremost American architects of the mid-19^th-century. From the street, passerby see a composition of conjoined rectangular blocks painted with a coral stucco capped with low-hipped roofs and overhanging eaves. A wooden porch projects from the frontal façade, supported by columns adorned with Hindu-inspired ornament.

Though now repurposed for academic and administrative use by Yale, the building once housed one of the university’s greatest scientific luminaries, Professor of Natural History and Geology James Dwight Dana. The house was passed down by the Dana family for generations. Despite the addition of wings, exterior rehab, and interior reconfigurations, the Dana House retains much of its historic character, reflecting a moment in New Haven’s architectural development when villa forms, particularly those built for academic patrons, were enriched with eclectic and often “exotic” motifs. In 1965, the James Dwight Dana house was designated a National Historic Landmark, a few years after its purchase by Yale University for academic and administrative use.

• 1849-1895: James Dwight Dana, Henrietta Frances Silliman Dana, and children
• 1895-1899: Henrietta Silliman Dana (widowed) and children
• 1900-1935: Edward Salisbury Dana (son of J.D. Dana), Caroline Bristol Dana, and children
• 1935-1962: Maria Trumbull Dana (daughter of J.D. Dana) and family
• 1962-1965: Yale University Labor and Management Office
• 1965-ca. 2010: Yale Department of Statistics
• Ca. 2010 – 2025: Yale University, general academic and managerial space

Before the Dana House was built in 1849, the parcel was known as “The Triangle” lot, siloed into the intersection of Hillhouse Avenue and Trumbull Street by the diagonally oriented Farmington Canal. Since the land was low and marshy (such that even in drought, water was found just eight feet below the surface), the Triangle Lot was presumed unsuitable for construction (NHPT). When the Farmington Canal found a lack of financial success, they sold control of the route in 1845 to a railroad company seeking to connect New York, New Haven, and Hartford in a single line. The railroad company offered Yale Professor Benjamin Silliman, the owner of the Triangle Lot at the time, to deposit the soil from deepening the canal bed into his lot. After agreeing, Silliman then sold the lot to his son-in-law and assistant, James Dwight Dana, for the construction of a family house (Dana, 8-9). The site was thus shaped by the infrastructural changes of the mid-19th century, as New Haven shifted from its basis in maritime trade to one of railroad-facilitated industry.

In the years following construction, the site largely remained the same, characterized by its steep southward slope toward the railroad line and the grand rhododendron bushes that flanked the exterior of the house (Bartlett, 61, Dana scrapbook, 75). Later, as Yale expanded, the context of the Hillhouse Avenue district gradually came under university purview, and the Dana House became wrapped in Yale’s campus fabric. In the 2024 renovation, the exterior grounds were reworked to enhance accessibility and encourage circumambulation, though the view of the site from the street front has remained largely consistent since the days when horse-drawn carriages graced the avenue.

Dana Family Tenancy (1849–1962)

James Dwight Dana first met Henrietta Silliman in 1838 when he had stopped by his professor’s, Benjamin Silliman’s, house and introduced himself to Silliman’s daughters before leaving on a four-year geology expedition. When James returned in 1842, he got engaged with Henrietta in less than a month, bought the lot at 24 Hillhouse Avenue from his father-in-law, and commissioned a house to be designed by architect Henry Austin for the Dana family in 1849 (Dana scrapbook, 66). Over the course of a storied sixty-year career at Yale University, James Dwight Dana became one of the foremost American geologists and mineralogists of his area, publishing over two hundred works and greatly expanding the reach of both fields.

Dana lived at 24 Hillhouse with his wife and six children until his death in April 1895. After his passing, his widow, Henrietta, remained until 1899, when she passed the residence to their son, Edward Salisbury Dana, and his family. Edward was himself a Yale professor, Curator of Yale’s Mineralogical Cabinet at the Peabody Museum, and a “perennial committee man” within the university (Dana scrapbook, 72). After the passing of E.S. Dana in 1935, his sister, Maria Trumbull Dana, took over stewardship of the Dana House. M.T. Dana died in 1961, and her heirs sold the house to Yale a year later.

While the Dana family, and their relatives in the Silliman, Bristol, and Trumbull families, resided at 24 Hillhouse, the residence was site for the convocation of a prominent intellectual and political milieu. In the late 19^th century, the Dana House was frequented by painter and colonel John Trumbull, abolitionist attorney Wendell Phillips, and scientists Louis Agassiz and Arnold Guyot (Bartlett, 63). The Dana children found the house a perfect breeding ground for social congregation, too; in 1914, photos show Amy Dana and her neighborhood friends gathered for the Hillhouse Avenue Banjo Club practice in the Dana House parlor. And, in the mid-20^th century, Maria Trumbull Dana would host Monday teas at the Hillhouse home, open to any members of the university and New Haven community (Dana scrapbook, 77-80).

Much of the knowledge of such prominence stems from the record-keeping efforts of Arnold Guyot Dana, one of J.D. Dana’s sons, who assembled over one hundred volumes of scrapbooks documenting the buildings and families of Yale and New Haven. A.G. Dana shared his history project, full of photographs, newspaper clippings, and letters, at his fiftieth Yale reunion in 1933, much to the delight of his classmates. The rich intellectual exchange, hospitality, and record-keeping within the Dana family underscore that their house served a role beyond private residence, a semi-public forum where academic ideas, culture, history, and community life were both shared and celebrated.

Yale Era (1962–Present)

When Yale acquired the property in 1962, the building was repurposed for academic and administrative use. It was first used as a Yale Labor and Management Office for a few years, then housed the Department of Statistics, and later was converted into a more general space for offices and classrooms. Despite a series of restorations and renovations, the university has treated the Dana House with care to its historical roots (Yale Capital Projects).

The house’s survival also not only owes itself to conservationist activism in New Haven, but itself spurred the institutionalization of city preservation efforts. In the early 1960s, after Yale’s purchase, the university proposed to demolish the Dana House for a new mathematics building. In response, a small group of New Haven citizens intervened to challenge the process. This group would soon incorporate as the New Haven Preservation Trust, which remains an active force today in protecting New Haven’s architectural heritage (NHPT: History).

Just three blocks from the Town Green, the Dana House sits within the Hillhouse Avenue Historic District, a microcosm of New Haven’s most celebrated residential architecture. Laid out in 1792 by US Congressman James Hillhouse and his son, the avenue was designed with broad, 50-foot setbacks and festooned with a promenade of grand elm trees (Bartlett, 56). The Farmington Canal, and later the New York to Hartford railway, cut through and under the avenue. Within the first century of its existence, Hillhouse Avenue was populated with an eclectic mix of residences that reflected an increasingly diverse set of architectural styles that were invading the imaginaries of American architects in the 19^th century. This included neo-Romanesque, Greek Revival, Colonial Revival, Italianate, High Victorian Gothic, and Queen-Anne style homes (NRHP: Hillhouse Ave District, 2). Many boasted ornamental variations imported from across the globe that often reflected the desire both by prominent Connecticut architects (e.g. Ithiel Town, A.J. Davis, Henry Austin) and prestigious academics to cultivate and display exotic taste.

Over the course of the 20th century, many of the houses on Hillhouse Avenue were acquired and adapted by Yale, subsuming the street into the campus. Because most of the Avenue south of Trumbull St. was demolished or redeveloped for institutional buildings, the Dana House marks the southern edge of the Hillhouse Avenue Historic District’s residential zone. Though some claim the “the street [today] seems to be in mourning,” with a widened roadway and the increased presence of dull brownstone, the Dana House’s location offers an intriguing point of architectural tension between Yale’s institutional presence and the city’s 19th-century genteel residential past (Brown, 136).

The brick walls of the Dana House are covered in a stucco which has been scored to evoke ashlar stone, and the frame is set upon a foundation of cut brownstone. The roof is made of sheet metal and configured in a low-pitched hipped, so low that with its wide overhanging eaves and wood-striped soffits, the roof appears from street view to be flat. A bracketed rectangular cupola pokes through the center of the house (NRHP: Dana House, 3). The eaves shelter a cornice underneath, where a repeated motif of trefoil arches forms in the negative space between a trim of wooden scallops (O’Gorman, 33-39). Initially built in 1849 as a neat cubic mass of 30 × 30 feet, the Dana House grew after its first half-century to about 60 × 58 feet through additions to the north and west wings, which themselves continue seamlessly the materiality and ornamentation of the original exterior envelope.

At the building’s front is a tetrastyle wooden porch propped up by columns of an organic, Hindu-inspired style (Brown, 138). The doorway is composed of two etched glass panels inset in a wooden frame and flanked by full-length louvered shutters. This door opens into a deep vestibule and stair hall, which organizes a first floor that now includes a classroom and welcoming lounge. Renovations have not rid the hardwood floors of their original charm; each room boasts a different pattern of inlaid woods (NHPT).

Cited Works

Bartlett, Ellen Strong. Historical Sketches of New Haven. Tuttle, Morehouse, and Taylor, 1897 (New Haven Free Public Library: Local History Room).

Brown, Elizabeth Mills. New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design. Yale University Press, 1976 (New Haven Free Public Library: Local History Room).

Dana, Arnold Guyot, Class of 1883, Yale College. Scrapbook Collection Titled “Yale: Old and New,” Volume 32 ½, 1933 (New Haven Museum: Whitney Library).

Dana, Henrietta Silliman. Hillhouse Avenue from 1809 to 1900. New Haven, 1907 (New Haven Free Public Library: Local History Room).

Hillhouse Avenue Historic District: National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) Inventory –Nomination Form. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 1985. Connecticut. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/73329b9b-ea32-4400-851b-b7128a252ea1.

James Dwight Dana House: National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) Inventory – Nomination Form. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 1974. https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/lz/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_CT/66000874_NHL.pdf.

New Haven, Connecticut directories, 1850–1970. The Price & Lee Co.

The New Haven Preservation Trust. “About Us: History.” n.d. https://nhpt.org/history.

The New Haven Preservation Trust. “James Dwight Dana House — the New Haven Preservation Trust.” n.d. https://nhpt.org/james-dwight-dana-house.

O’Gorman, James F. Henry Austin: In Every Variety of Architectural Style. Wesleyan University Press, 2008. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/452/pdf/download.

“24 Hillhouse Avenue Renovation.” Yale University, Capital Projects. https://capitalprojects.yale.edu/project/24-hillhouse-avenue-renovation.

Additional Sources

Caplan, Colin M. A Guide to New Haven, Connecticut. The History Press, 2007.

Kelley, Brooks Mather. New Haven Heritage; an Area of Historic Houses on Hillhouse Avenue and Trumbull Street. New Haven Preservation Trust, 1974 (New Haven Free Public Library: Local History Room).

New Haven Architecture: Selections from the Historic American Buildings Survey. Vol. 9. Historic American Buildings Survey, Division of Historic Architecture, National Park Service, 1970. https://npshistory.com/publications/habs-haer-hals/selections/9.pdf.

Sanborn-Perris Map Co. Lmtd. New Haven, Connecticut, 1901. “Insurance Maps of New Haven, Connecticut,” Vol. 1 (New Haven Museum: Whitney Library).

Pinnell, Patrick L. The Campus Guide: Yale University. Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.

New Haven Architecture: Selections from the Historic American Buildings Survey. Vol. 9. Historic American Buildings Survey, Division of Historic Architecture, National Park Service, 1970. https://npshistory.com/publications/habs-haer-hals/selections/9.pdf.

Kelley, Brooks Mather. New Haven Heritage; an Area of Historic Houses on Hillhouse Avenue and Trumbull Street. New Haven Preservation Trust, 1974 (New Haven Free Public Library: Local History Room).