Our History

The Yale Alumni Association of Cleveland was founded Jan. 27, 1881 with an inaugural dinner attended by 36 local alumni representing classes from 1817 to 1880. With Cleveland one of the earlier and larger Yale alumni groups outside New Haven (an 1885 Daily News survey identified it as the eighth oldest, with about 175 members), regrets came in from then-Yale President Noah Porter, former Yale President Theodore D. Woolsey and future Yale President Timothy Dwight V.

At the time, Cleveland was booming because of oil and steel. The Yale alumni association’s launch was a brainchild of two 1868 alumni, lawyer John Howard Webster and businessman Charles W. Bingham, for whom Bingham Hall in New Haven was later named. The bylaws they wrote are basically still used by YAAC today. But Cleveland's ties to Yale already were deep, a consequence of Cleveland being part of Connecticut's Western Reserve, and named after its first Connecticut surveyor, Moses Cleaveland, a 1777 Yale graduate. A two-way pipeline developed, with Yale graduates staffing Western Reserve College in Hudson, Ohio, after it was chartered in 1826, while the college sent its graduates to Yale to finish their education -- at the time, a challenging journey.