As evidence of the labors that were contributed by the students themselves for the construction of these buildings.

This Latin inscription is located above an entryway that had been Evarts’ Entry, named after William Maxwell Evarts, who graduated from Yale in 1837 and became U.S. Secretary of State and Leader of the American Bar Association. Today, it stands above Branford Courtyard Entryway K as a memorial dedicated to student workers who helped build the Memorial Quadrangle. In the summer of 1920, amid worker strikes and shortages, labor was scarce to complete the project as planned. To fill in this gap, low-income students who needed to work to pay for their education worked on the construction teams. Architect James Gamble Rogers’ superintendent, George Nichols, sketched the structure, and a stonecutter chiseled the design directly into the stone walls of the Memorial Quadrangle.

From a distance, the text and the frieze are difficult to discern. Upon closer inspection, it depicts four men with tools. Knee-deep in the dirt, two men are digging with shovels, one is holding a pickaxe, and another is hauling away debris, all working together to build the foundation of the Quadrangle, the place where they and others would study the liberal arts. In the foreground is an image of a glass window bordered by elm trees (which lined New Haven streets), their leafy branches adorning the window’s arch. This window also functions as an actual four-paned window on the building structure. In the background, there is wooden scaffolding visible and two tower structures in the Quadrangle – the one on the left is the gatehouse of Calliope Court, which adjoins Branford Courtyard, and the one on the right is Saybrook College’s Wrexham Tower (based on St. Giles Church in Wrexham, Wales; Elihu Yale is buried in the churchyard).

This stone carving marks one of the few places Yale student workers’ contributions are recognized – although anonymously. Yale’s Office of the Secretary published an official English translation, which emphasizes the students’ “contribution” to “erecting these buildings.” This obscures the physical labor of the individual students who actively participated in the building process. Their names were not memorialized in the records of this inscription, their contributions remain forgotten. Tragically, some workers died while constructing the Quadrangle, and this inscription is their only memorial.