What a week… more SNOW and cold… so, next to the wood fire I
took some time to look back on history…and as usual I found some interesting
reading. It pertains to a little book we
are putting out for our May, Memorial Day special... since it is the 220th
Anniversary of Eaton’s founding. The
date that I was interested in is coming up this week... April 29th, 1792. It stood out as born
on this day in history in England was a lad named Matthew Vassar who became a
beer mogul of the 1800’s. Yes BEER mogul!
A few years after his birth his family move to America to
seek some religious freedom with entertained thoughts of starting a beer
business… since both Matthew’s father James and his brother Thomas were English
“brewers”.
The two bought some land on the Hudson near Wappinger’s
Creek, but it wasn’t until Thomas returned from England with English barley
that the family began to brew ale.
As he grew Matthew did not want to be a tanner, the trade
his father chose for him … so he ran away from home to make his own
“fortune”. After many jobs he became
successful enough to move back to his family and start making beer with
them. The Vassar Brewery in Poughkeepsie
became a large concern whose success was interrupted when fire destroyed the
brewery and Matthew’s father was killed by fumes when inspecting the damage.
To make a long story short, after much trial and tribulation, Matthew became rich and began a climb that went from owning a huge beer business
to incorporating the
Poughkeepsie Savings Bank in 1831 in which he took a prominent lead, and the
formation of the Poughkeepsie Whaling Company in 1832, of which he was a
subscriber/shareholder, and a director and a trustee of the young city of
Poughkeepsie. He also ran to a brick
making business and in 1842 took on the development of the Hudson River
Railroad to get his beer to New York City when the Hudson froze over.
When
a step-niece, Lydia Booth, move from Virginia
to New York to take the reins of a women’s Seminary school in Poughkeepsie… he
helped support her and at that point became enlightened about the importance of
education for females.
After
a trip to England and noticing buildings donated with the donors names on them
as monuments to them, he decided that a female educational institute would be
the perfect thing to put is name to…it would be a lasting honor… So he did… he
founded Vassar College… at that time for women.
Not
only did he donate close to $500,000, in those days a vast sum, but became
intimately involved it its construction and hired Maria Mitchell the astronomer
as its first professor. He toured Europe
to learn about women’s education and even gave his house and art collection to
the new college which, opened in 1865 to 353 young women.
When
he decided to retire as head of the Board of Trustees for Vassar in 1868, and
while delivering his farewell speech to the board, Vassar collapsed and
died. They placed him in a chair and
after a short silence… one of the other men read the finish of his address as
follows…
“And
now, gentlemen, in closing these remarks, I would humbly and solemnly implore
the Divine Goodness to continue his smiles and favor on your institution, and
bestow upon all hearts connected therewith his love and blessings, having
peculiarly protected us by his providence through all our college trials for
three consecutive years, without a single death in our Board or serious illness
or death of one of our pupils within its walls. Wishing you, gentlemen, a
continuance of health and happiness, I bid you a cordial and final farewell,
thanking you kindly for your official attentions and services, not expecting,
from my advanced years and increasing infirmities, to meet with you officially
again, and imploring the Divine Goodness to guide and direct you aright in all
your counsels and social business relations.”
April 29th, his birthday is still today
celebrated as “Founder’s Day and the college
(now coed) is a major success. Its
main President, John Raymond who taught at Colgate, was married to Cornelia
Morse of Eaton and the Morse family girls attended, taught at, and left money
to this cause…more on this later…
PS (Maria Mitchell’s secretary and assistant was one
of them.) I love it when history leads
you from one place to another close to home and old Eaton.
