and 35,000 persons attended the free public lectures in art, science,
technology, etc., and free concerts, chiefly organ recitals, weekly,
during the winter months.
The Institute has been fortunate in its gifts from friends. Mr. George
W. Childs gave to it his rare and valuable collection of manuscripts and
autographs, fine engravings, ivories, books on art, etc.; Mrs. John R.
Fell, a daughter of Mr. Drexel, a collection of ancient jewellery and
rare old clocks; Mrs. James W. Paul, another daughter of Mr. Drexel,
$10,000 as a memorial of her mother, to be used in the purchase of
articles for the museum; while other members of the family have given
bronzes, metal-work, and unique and useful gifts.
Mr. Drexel lived to see his Institute doing its noble work. So
interested was he that he stopped daily as he went to the bank to see
the young people at their duties. He was greatly interested in the
evening classes. "This part of the work," says Dr. MacAlister, "he
watched with great eagerness, and he was specially desirous that young
people who were compelled to work through the day should have
opportunities in the evening equal to those who took the regular daily
work of the Institution."
Mr. Drexel died suddenly, June 30, 1893, about two years after the
building of the Institute, from apoplexy, at Carlsbad, Germany. He had
gone to Europe for his health, as was his custom yearly, and seemed
about as well as usual until the stroke came. Two weeks before he had
had a mild attack of pleurisy, but would not permit his family to be
told of it, thinking that he would fully recover.
Mr. Drexel left behind him the memory of a modest, unassuming man; so
able a financier that he was asked to accept the position of Secretary
of the Treasury of the United States, but declined; so generous a giver,
that he built his monument before his death in his elegant and helpful
Institute, an honor to his native city, Philadelphia, and an honor to
his family.
PHILIP D. ARMOUR
AND HIS INSTITUTE.
Philip D. Armour was born in Stockbridge, Madison County, N.Y., and
spent his early life on a farm. In 1852, when he was twenty years of
age, he went to California, and finally settled in Chicago, where he has
become very wealthy by dealing in packed meat, which is sent to almost
every corner of the earth.
"He pays six or seven millions of dollars yearly in wages," writes
Arthur Warren in an interesting article in _McClure's Magazine_,
February, 1894, "owns four thousand railway cars, which are used in
transporting his goods, and has seven or eight hundred horses to haul
his wagons. Fifty or sixty thousand persons receive direct support from
the wages paid in his meatpacking business alone, if we estimate
families on the census basis. He is a larger owner of grain-elevators
than any other individual in either hemisphere; he is the proprietor of
a glue factory, which turns out a product of seven millions of tons a
year; and he is actively interested in an important railway enterprise."
He manages his business with great system, and knows from his heads of
departments, some of whom he pays a salary of $25,000 yearly, what takes
place from day to day in his various works. He is a quiet, self-centred
man, a good listener, has excellent judgment, and possesses untiring
energy.
"All my life," he says, "I have been up with the sun. The habit is as
easy at sixty-one as it was at sixteen; perhaps easier, because I am
hardened to it. I have my breakfast at half-past five or six; I walk
down town to my office, and am there by seven, and I know what is going
on in the world without having to wait for others to come and tell me.
At noon I have a simple luncheon of bread and milk, and after that,
usually, a short nap, which freshens me again for the afternoon's work.
I am in bed again at nine o'clock every night."
Mr. Armour thinks there are as great and as many opportunities for men
to succeed in life as there ever have been. He said to Mr. Warren:
"There was never a better time than the present, and the future will
bring even greater opportunities than the past. Wealth, capital, can do
nothing without brains to direct it. It will be as true in the future as
it is in the present that brains make capital--capital does not make
brains. The world does not stand still. Changes come quicker now than
they ever did, and they will come quicker and quicker. New ideas, new
inventions, new methods of manufacture, of transportation, new ways to
do almost everything, will be found as the world grows older; and the
men who anticipate them, and who are ready for them, will find
advantages as great as any their fathers or grandfathers have had."
[Illustration: PHILIP D. ARMOUR.]
Mr. Frank G. Carpenter, the well-known journalist, relates this incident
of Mr. Armour:--
"He is a good judge of men, and he usually puts the right man in the
right place. I am told that he never discharges a man if he can help it.
If the man is not efficient he gives instructions to have him put in
some other department, but to keep him if possible. There are certain
things, however, which he will not tolerate; and among these are
laziness, intemperance, and getting into debt. As to the last, he says
he believes in good wages, and that he pays the best. He tells his men
that if they are not able to live on the wages he pays them he does not
want them to work for him. Not long ago he met a policeman in his
office.
"'What are you doing here, sir?' he asked.
"'I am here to serve a paper,' was the reply.
"'What kind of a paper?' asked Mr. Armour.
"'I want to garnishee one of your men's wages for debt,' said the
policeman.
"'Indeed,' replied Mr. Armour; 'and who is the man?' He thereupon asked
the policeman into his private office, and ordered the debtor to come
in. He then asked the clerk how long he had been in debt. The man
replied that for twenty years he had been behind, and that he could not
catch up.
"'But you get a good salary,' said Mr. Armour, 'don't you?'
"'Yes,' said the clerk; 'but I can't get out of debt. My life is such
that somehow or other I can't get out.'
"'But you must get out,' said Mr. Armour, 'or you must leave here. How
much do you owe?'
"The clerk then gave the amount. It was less than $1,000. Mr. Armour
took his check-book, and wrote out an order for the amount. 'There,' he
said, as he handed the clerk the check, 'there is enough to pay all
your debts. Now I want you to keep out of debt, and if I hear of your
getting into debt again you will have to leave.'
"The man took the check. He did pay his debts, and remodelled his life
on a cash basis. About a year after the above incident happened he came
to Mr. Armour, and told him that he had had a place offered him at a
higher salary, and that he was going to leave. He thanked Mr. Armour,
and told him that his last year had been the happiest of his life, and
that getting out of debt had made a new man of him."
When Mr. Armour was asked by Mr. Carpenter to what he attributed his
great success, he replied:--
"I think that thrift and economy have had much to do with it. I owe much
to my mother's training, and to a good line of Scotch ancestors, who
have always been thrifty and economical."
Mr. Armour has not been content to spend his life in amassing wealth
only. After the late Joseph Armour bequeathed a fund to establish Armour
Mission, Philip D. Armour doubled the fund, or more than doubled it; and
now the Mission has nearly two thousand children in its Sunday-school,
with free kindergarten and free dispensary. Mr. Armour goes to the
Mission every Sunday afternoon, and finds great happiness among the
children.
To yield a revenue yearly for the Mission, Mr. Armour built "Armour
Flats," a great building adjoining the Mission, with a large grass-plot
in the centre, where in two hundred and thirteen flats, having each from
six to seven rooms, families can find clean and attractive homes, with a
rental of from seventeen to thirty-five dollars a month.
"There is an endowed work," says Mr. Armour, "that cannot be altered by
death, or by misunderstandings among trustees, or by bickerings of any
kind. Besides, a man can do something to carry out his ideas while he
lives, but he can't do so after he is in the grave. Build pleasant homes
for people of small incomes, and they will leave their ugly
surroundings, and lead brighter lives."
Mr. Armour, aside from many private charities, has given over a million
and a half dollars to the Armour Institute of Technology. The five-story
fire-proof building of red brick trimmed with brown stone was finished
Dec. 6, 1892, on the corner of Thirty-third Street and Armour Avenue;
and the keys were put in the hands of the able and eloquent preacher,
Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus, "to formulate," says the Chicago _Tribune_, Oct.
15, 1893, "more exactly than Mr. Armour had done the lines on which this
work was to go forward. Dr. Gunsaulus had long ago reached the
conclusion that the best way to prepare men for a home in heaven is to
make it decently comfortable for them here."
Dr. Gunsaulus put his heart and energy into this noble work. The
academic department prepares students to enter any college in the
country; the technical department gives courses in mechanical
engineering, electricity, and electrical engineering, mining
engineering, and metallurgy. The department of domestic arts offers
instruction in cooking, dressmaking, millinery, etc.; the department of
commerce fits persons for a business life, wisely combining with its
course in shorthand and typewriting such a knowledge of the English
language, history, and some modern languages, as will make the students
do intelligent work for authors, lawyers, and educated people in
general.
Special attention has been given to the gymnasium, that health may be
fully attended to. Mr. Armour has spared neither pains nor expense to
provide the best machinery, especially for electrical work. "In a few
years," he says, "we shall be doing everything by electricity. Before
long our steam-engines will be as old-fashioned as the windmills are
now."
Dr. Gunsaulus has taken great pleasure in gathering books, prints, etc.,
for the library, which already has a choice collection of works on the
early history of printing.
The Institute was opened in September, 1893, with six hundred pupils,
and has been most useful and successful from the first.
LEONARD CASE
AND THE SCHOOL OF APPLIED SCIENCE.
Technological schools are springing up so rapidly all over our country
that it would be impossible to name them all. The Stevens Institute of
Technology at Hoboken, N.J., was organized in 1871, with a gift of
$650,000; the Towne Scientific School, Philadelphia, 1872, $1,000,000;
the Miller School, Batesville, Va., 1878, $1,000,000; the Rose
Polytechnic, Terre Haute, Ind., 1883, over $500,000; the Case School of
Applied Science of Cleveland, Ohio, 1881, over $2,000,000.
Leonard Case, the giver of the Case School and the Case Library, born
June 27, 1820, was a quiet, scholarly man, who gave wisely the wealth
amassed by his father. The family on the paternal side came from
Holland; on the maternal side from Germany. Mr. James D. Cleveland, in a
recent sketch of the founder of Case School, gives an interesting
account of the ancestors of Mr. Case.
The great-grandfather of Leonard Case, Leonard Eckstein, when a youth,
had a quarrel with the Catholic clergy in Nuremberg, near which city he
was born, and was in consequence thrown into prison, where he nearly
starved. One day his sister brought him a cake which contained a slender
silk cord baked in it. This cord was let down from his cell window to a
friend, who fastened it to a rope which, when drawn up, enabled the
young man to slide down a wall eighty feet above the ground.
After his escape, the youth of nineteen came to America, and landed in
Philadelphia without a cent of money. Later he married and moved to
Western Pennsylvania; and his daughter Magdalene married Meshach Case,
the grandfather of Leonard Case.
Meshach was an invalid from asthma. In 1799 he and his wife came on
horseback to explore Ohio, and perhaps make a home. They bought two
hundred acres of the wilderness in the township of Warren, built a log
cabin, and cleared an acre of timber around it. The following year
others came to settle, and all celebrated the Fourth of July with
instruments made on the grounds. Their drum was a piece of hollow
pepperidge-tree with a fawn's skin stretched over it, and a fife was
made from an elder stem.
The eldest son, Leonard, who was a hard worker from a child, at seven
cutting wood for the fires, at ten thrashing grain, at fourteen
ploughing and harvesting, took cold when heated, and became ill for two
years and a cripple for the rest of his life, using crutches as he
walked. Early in life, when it was the fashion to use intoxicating
liquors, Leonard made a pledge never to use them, and was a total
abstainer as long as he lived, thus setting a noble example to the
growing community.
Determined to have an education, he invented some instruments for
drafting, bottomed all the chairs in the neighborhood, made sieves for
the farmers, and thus earned a little money for books. As his
handwriting was good, he was made clerk of the little court at Warren,
and later of the Supreme Court for Trumbull County, where he had an
opportunity to study, and copy the records of the Connecticut Land
Company.
A friend advised him to study law, and furnished him with books, which
advice he followed. Later, in 1816, he moved to Cleveland, and was made
cashier of a bank just organized. He was a man of public spirit,
suggested the planting of trees which have made Cleveland known as the
Forest City, was sent to the Legislature, and finally became president
of a bank, as well as land agent of the Connecticut Land Company. He was
universally respected and esteemed.
The hard-working invalid had become rich through increase in value of
the large amount of land which he had purchased. He died Dec. 7, 1864,
seven years after his wife's death, and two years after the death of his
very promising son William, of consumption. The latter was deeply
interested in natural history, and in 1859 had begun to erect a building
for the Young Men's Library Association and the Kirtland Society of
Natural History. This project his surviving brother, Leonard, carried
out.
After the death of father, mother, and brother, Leonard Case was left to
inherit the property. He had graduated at Yale College in 1842, and was
admitted to the bar in 1844. He, however, devoted himself to literary
pursuits, and travelled extensively over this country and abroad.
Ill health in later years increased his natural reticence and dislike of
publicity. He gave generously where he became interested. To the Library
Association he first gave $20,000. In 1876 he gave Case Building and
grounds, then valued at $225,000, to the Library Association. It is now
worth over half a million dollars, and furnishes a good income for its
library of over 40,000 volumes. Under the excellent management of Mr.
Charles Orr, the librarian, the building has been remodelled, and the
library much enlarged. The membership fee is one dollar annually.
The same year, 1876, Mr. Case determined to carry out his plan of a
School of Applied Science. He corresponded with various eminent men; and
on Feb. 24, 1877, after gifts to his father's relatives, he conveyed his
property to trustees for a school where should be taught mathematics,
physics, mechanical and civil engineering, chemistry, mining and
metallurgy, natural history, modern languages, etc., to fit young men
for practical work in life.
"How well this foresight was inspired," says Mr. Cleveland, "is shown in
the great demand by the city and country at large for the men who have
received training at the Case School. Hundreds are called for by iron,
steel, and chemical works, here and elsewhere, to act in laboratories or
in direction of important engineering, in mines, railroads, construction
of docks, waterworks, electrical projects, and architecture. Nearly
forty new professions have been opened to the youth of Cleveland, which
were unavailable before this school was founded."
Cady Staley, Ph.D. LL.D., is the president of Case School, which has an
able corps of professors. There are nearly 250 students in the
institution.
Leonard Case died Jan. 6, 1880; but his school and his library
perpetuate his name, and make his memory honored.
ASA PACKER
AND LEHIGH UNIVERSITY.
In the midst of twenty acres stands Lehigh University, at South
Bethlehem, Penn., founded by Asa Packer,--a great school of technology,
with courses in civil, mechanical, mining, and electrical engineering,
chemistry, and architecture. The school of general literature of the
University has a classical course, a Latin-scientific course, and a
course in science and letters.
To this institution Judge Packer gave three and one-quarter millions
during his life; and by will, eventually, the University will become one
of the richest in the country.
He did not give to Lehigh University alone. "St. Luke's Hospital, so
well known throughout eastern Pennsylvania for its noble and practical
charity," says Mr. Davis Brodhead in the _Magazine of American History_,
June, 1885, "is also sustained by the endowments of Asa Packer. Indeed,
when we consider the scope of his generosity, of which Washington and
Lee University of Virginia, Muhlenburg College at Allentown, Penn.,
Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia, and many churches throughout
his native State, of different denominations, can bear witness, we can
the better appreciate how truly catholic were his gifts. His
benefactions did not pause upon State lines, nor recognize sectional
divisions.
"In speaking of his generosity, Senator T. F. Bayard once said, 'The
confines of a continent were too narrow for his sense of human
brotherhood, which recognized its ties everywhere upon this footstool of
the Almighty, and decreed that all were to be united to share in the
fruits of his life-long labor.'"
Asa Packer was born in Groton, Conn., Dec. 29, 1805. As his father had
been unsuccessful in business he could not educate his boy, who found
employment in a tannery in North Stonington. His employer soon died, and
the youth was obliged to go to work on a farm.
He was ambitious, and determined to seek his fortune farther west; so
with real courage walked from Connecticut to Susquehanna County, Penn.,
and in the new county took up the trade of carpenter and joiner.
For ten years he worked hard at his trade. He purchased a few acres in
the native forest, cleared off the trees, and built a log house, to
which he took his bride. When children were born into the home she made
all the clothing, and in every way helped the poor, industrious
carpenter to make a living.
In 1833, when he was twenty-eight years old, Mr. Packer moved his family
to Mauch Chunk in the Lehigh Valley, hoping that he could earn a little
more money by his trade.
When he had leisure, his busy mind was thinking how the vast supplies of
coal and iron in the Lehigh Valley could be transported East. In the
fall of 1833 the carpenter chartered a canal boat, and doing most of
the manual labor himself, he started with a load of coal to
Philadelphia through the Lehigh Canal.
Making a little money out of this venture, he secured another boat, and
in 1835 took his brother into partnership, and they together commenced
dealing in general merchandise. This firm was the first to carry
anthracite coal through to New York, it having been carried previously
to Philadelphia, and from there re-shipped to New York.
With Asa Packer's energy, honesty, and broad thinking, the business grew
to good-sized proportions. Then he realized that they must have steam
for quicker transportation. He urged the Lehigh Coal and Navigation
Company to build a railroad along the banks of their canal; but they
refused, thinking that coal and lumber could only pay water freights. In
September, 1847, a charter was granted to the Delaware, Lehigh,
Schuylkill, and Susquehanna Railroad Company; but the people were
indifferent, and the time of the charter was within seventeen days of
expiring, when Asa Packer became one of the board of managers, and by
his efforts graded one mile of the road, thus saving the charter. Two
years later the name of the company was changed to the Lehigh Valley
Railroad Company, and Mr. Packer had a controlling portion of the stock.
So much faith had he in the project that no one else, apparently, had
faith in, that he offered to build the road from Mauch Chunk to Easton,
a distance of forty-six miles, and take his pay in the stocks and bonds
of the company.
The offer was accepted; and the road was finished in 1855, four years
after it was begun, but not without many discouragements and great
financial strain. Mr. Packer was made president of the railroad company,
which position he held as long as he lived.
Already wealth and honors had come to the energetic carpenter. In 1842
and 1843 he was elected to the State Legislature, and became one of the
two associate judges for the new county of Carbon.
In 1852, and again in 1854, he was elected to Congress as a Democrat,
and made a useful record for himself. So universally respected was he in
Pennsylvania for his Christian life, as well as for his successful
business career, that he was prominently mentioned as a presidential
candidate, Pennsylvania voting solidly for him through fourteen ballots;
and when his name was withdrawn the delegates voted for Horatio Seymour.
In 1869, Judge Packer was nominated for governor; but the State was
strongly Republican, having given General Grant the previous year 25,000
majority. Judge Packer was defeated by only 4,500 votes, showing his
popularity in his own State.
Two years before this, in the autumn of 1867, his great gift, Lehigh
University, had been opened to pupils. It has now considerably over four
hundred students, from thirty-five various States and countries. It was
named by Judge Packer, who would not allow his own name to be used.
After his death the largest of the buildings was called Packer Hall, but
by the wording of the charter the name of the University can never be
changed. The Packer Memorial Church, a handsome structure, is the gift
of Mrs. Packer Cummings, the daughter of the founder. To the east of
Packer Hall is the University Library with 97,000 volumes, the building
costing $100,000, erected by Judge Packer in memory of his daughter Mrs.
Lucy Packer Linderman. At his death he endowed the library with a fund
of $500,000.
Judge Packer died May 17, 1879, and is buried in the little cemetery at
Mauch Chunk in the picturesque Lehigh Valley. He lived simply, giving
away during the last few years of his life over $4,000,000.
Said the president of the University, Rev. Dr. John M. Leavitt, in a
memorial sermon delivered in University Chapel, June 15, 1879, "Not only
his magnificent bequests are our treasures; we have something more
precious,--his _character_ is the noblest legacy of Asa Packer to the
Lehigh University....
"He was both gentle and inflexible, persuasive and commanding, in his
sensibilities refined and delicate as a woman, and in his intellect and
resolve clear and strong as a successful military leader.... Genial
kindness flowed out from him as beams from the sun. Never at any period
of his life is it possible to conceive in him a churlish or niggardly
spirit.... During nearly fifty years he was connected with our church,
usually as an officer, and for much of the long period was a constant
and exemplary communicant.... Like the silent light giving bloom to the
world, his faith had a vitalizing power. He grasped the truth of
Christianity and the position of the church, and showed his creed by his
life."
CORNELIUS VANDERBILT
AND VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY.