iVfter Commencement in September 1719, the trustees of Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut, felt a great sense of relief. Six of the eleven trustees had helped to found the school nearly two decades before and they had watched it through vicissitudes and difficulties which had threatened to destroy it altogether. The trustees were the Revs. Samuel Mather, Windsor; Samuel Andrew, Milford; Timothy Woodbridge, Hartford; Samuel Russell, Branford; Joseph Webb, Fairfield; Moses Noyes, Lyme; Thomas Ruggles, Guilford; John Davenport, Stamford; Thomas Buckingham, Hart ford; Stephen Buckingham, Norwalk; and Eliphalet Adams, New London. All were Harvard graduates. Five, Mather, Andrew, Wood bridge, Russell, and Webb, were original trustees (1701); Noyes became a trustee in 1703. Only two, Stephen Buckingham and Adams, were under fifty; and two, Noyes and Mather, were over seventy. Adams, the youngest, had graduated from Harvard nearly thirty years before.1