Who is matthew vassar

It is hard to imagine Vassar, accustomed to the spaciousness and grandeur of a townhouse, in such cramped quarters. His housekeeper, Amanda Germond, and his estate manager shared the house with him. Germond, acted as his hostess when he entertained college visitors at Springside.

In December a local paper noted that Vassar was in the last year of his several-year presidency of the Lyceum when he addressed its members before the first course of lectures of the year. Later on in the season, Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke.

The year was important to Poughkeepsie and to Matthew Vassar in at least three ways. The city was incorporated that year; Matthew Vassar became president of the Poughkeepsie Aqueduct and Hydraulic Company, the purpose of which was to supply Poughkeepsie with good, clean water important to beermaking as well as to the citizenry at large.

And it was a year in which a prohibition law was passed the Prohibitory Law of , Chapter of the Laws of Clark favored prohibition, and Vassar lobbied as hard as he could in Albany to defeat it.

By Vassar had determined to endow a college for women as an enduring benefaction for posterity. There were many conflicting suggestions from advisers and his relatives, once he made known his ambitions regarding the founding of an institution which would serve as a memorial to the Vassar name.

He was primarily influenced in his deliberations by two individuals, he said: his step-niece, Lydia Booth, who championed the cause of women, and a fellow Baptist, the Reverend Milo P. Jewett, an educator from the South who moved to Poughkeepsie before the Civil War. Lydia Booth died suddenly at age 51 in , and her school closed. Many of the ideas incorporated into the planning for the college were conceived by Jewett, who was very ambitious and who acted also as an emissary for Vassar in his quest for information about higher education.

Once determined to found and endow a college, he left no stone unturned to find out experiences and useful ideas of educators. An important detail of this growth is that, when asked, he joined the board of trustees of the University of Rochester, of which is friend, Martin P. Anderson, was president, and he learned a great deal from his association with Anderson. Vassar came to hold very strong convictions that women should be offered the same opportunity for education as men. A few years before he formed his board of trustees in , Vassar commissioned Thomas Alexander Tefft, an American architect, to draw up plans for the building of the college.

Having submitted first drafts, Tefft was in the process of refining them when he died in of the Italian fever in Florence. Soon thereafter Vassar gave the commission to James Renwick, Jr. On February 26, , Vassar established his college, an act which was to consume his energies and enthusiasm for the rest of his life.

He invited 28 men, half of them Baptist clergymen, to form a board of trustees and to ask the New York State legislature to incorporate Vassar Female College. The first meeting of the board was held at the Hotel Gregory in Poughkeepsie, and Jewett was elected president. Matthew Vassar donated the funds for the endowment of the college in a tin box.

But Vassar had picked a time of economic strain to build his college. Fort Sumter was fired upon on April 12, Nevertheless, the college went up pretty much on schedule and was ready for the opening on September 26, While he was away, Vassar himself took on some of the work of answering letters of inquiry about the college and dealing with relations with the outside world.

He was also actively involved in planning a landscape for the campus and working out details about the heating system. Here his business experience came into sharp focus, and he kept a daily eye on the campus as a kind of works manager ex-officio. Between December when Jewett returned and April when he resigned as president, tensions arose between Jewett and several of the members of the board of trustees, especially Matthew Vassar, Jr.

Vassar, Jr. Jewett, frustrated by the decision not to open in the fall of when he thought the building would be ready, made some indiscreet criticisms of the senior Vassar in a letter to some of the trustees. His insubordination was discovered by Vassar, who asked for his resignation. Thereupon, the Reverend John Raymond, a member of the board with experience in running an educational institution for men, the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, was persuaded to become the president.

It was he who really set the college in motion and helped it weather its problematic first several years. He chose most of the nine professors, except for Maria Mitchell, who had already been invited by Matthew Vassar to be professor of astronomy.

He sent out a prospectus, and he presided over the admission of students and the development of the curriculum. In January Catharine Vassar died at age At that time Vassar gave up his town house and thereafter lived year-round in the farm cottage at Springside. He designed an impressive tombstone to decorate the grave of his wife and himself.

It was a large marble acorn atop a column. The Vassar family came to America only a few short years after Matthew was born, and few predicted the legacy that he would leave behind.

Once the Vassar clan arrived in America, they chose to settle in Dutchess County, NY, close to the familiar faces of friends from England. Thomas sailed with the rest of the Vassar family, but forgot the hops and was forced to return to England. James and Thomas Vassar planted the first acre of barley Dutchess County had ever seen in Shortly thereafter, in , they created a brewing company. Matthew, however, had the desire to start his own brewery, and he was determined and driven in his efforts to achieve this goal.

Matthew was not only interested in building his brewing business. He expanded his work into many different industries including the Poughkeepsie Savings Bank, real estate investing, patent purchasing and building an aqueduct that brought sufficient amounts of water.

Years later, after visiting the hospital his late brother had founded, Vassar decided that he too wished to be remembered fondly after his passing. By , after Thomas Vassar had returned to his homeland to purchase English barley, the Vassar brewing business had become decidedly successful.

Matthew, however, found the enterprise "distasteful" and refused to participate. Then, learning of his father's plan to apprentice him to a tanner, Vassar panicked and decided to run away from home.

Vassar soon reached Balmville, where he met Mr. Butterworth, a benevolent Englishman whose son ran a country store. As his first business venture, Vassar negotiated a job for himself at the store and worked for the family at a rate of dollars a year. Three years later, however, he accepted a better paying position with another local merchant, Daniel Smith. Then, having proved himself capable of earning a living, Vassar returned to Poughkeepsie in with dollars in his pocket, ready to join his father's brewing business.

Unfortunately, the business literally went up in smoke the following year. A fire raged through the main brewery, gutting the building and devastating Vassar's father financially. The following day, Vassar's older brother, John Guy Vassar, attempting to inspect the wreckage, died from carbonic acid poisoning.

The immeasurable loss left James Vassar emotionally and financially paralyzed, and Matthew Vassar assumed responsibility of his brother's two sons, John Guy Jr. Vassar wrote and published a mini-biography about his dog Tip. The Life of Poor Dog Tip, illustrated throughout, chronicles Tip's life and delight in chasing squirrels. In his brief autobiography, Matthew Vassar describes summer as the moment that "began the world.

While spending his days "brewing at the dye-house," Vassar worked nights in a saloon he had opened in the basement of the County Courthouse. Financially secure at the age of twenty, he proposed to and married Catharine Valentine of Fishkill and began renting a modest apartment at the rate of forty dollars a year.

Upon turning twenty-one, Vassar attempted to vote but was denied on the basis of being an "alien. Two years later, when Purser resigned due to poor health, the Conklin brothers stepped in and became partners in M. During the Conklin period, the brewing business progressed despite several complications.

Vassar experienced yet another bout with "bilious typhus", a broken leg, and a severe cold which left him bedridden for a full year. Between maladies, a series of "fires and floods" threatened the brewery and brought Vassar to "the verge of Bankruptcy.

By the time Vassar dissolved the Conklin partnership in , he was counted among Poughkeepsie's elite. After becoming a Poughkeepsie village trustee in , Vassar began volunteering his time as recording secretary for the Dutchess County Colonization Society 4 in He lunched that year with Lafayette during his return to the United States, and "took a prominent lead" in establishing both the Poughkeepsie Savings Bank and the Poughkeepsie Whaling Company.

In , Vassar secured the presidency of Poughkeepsie as the "Improvement" candidate. In , Vassar invited nephews John Guy Jr. While many businesses suffered during the depression, M.