Cornelliana ‘Good Health, Tempered Courage, and Sound Common Sense’ Stories You May Like A Conversation with Life Trustee Ezra Cornell ’70, BS ’71 Are You an Ezra—or an Andrew? Mr. Cornell Goes to Albany: Ezra’s (Other) Life-Size Likeness Those are the gifts that fate gave Ezra Cornell, per one historian. Here's a look at his life—from humble beginnings to great wealth By Beth Saulnier He was 19 when he left home to seek his fortune. He set out on foot, walking 33 miles to Syracuse from the family home in DeRuyter, nine dollars in his pocket and some clothes bundled in a handkerchief. In Syracuse, he found work as a carpenter, but he didn’t stay long; within a week he’d been robbed twice. He moved on to Homer, working in a shop that made wool-carding machinery, supplementing his third-grade education by studying books on mechanics in his spare time. His father was a farmer who owned a modest pottery works and traveled throughout Upstate New York selling his wares; he likely told his son about the little boomtown at the southern tip of Cayuga Lake. Over the previous two decades, Ithaca had grown into a bustling community of 2,000 people. A vintage engraving depicting the tunnel that Ezra blasted through Fall Creek Gorge to power a nearby mill. With the expansion of the railroads—and the imminent building of the Sodus Canal to connect the Erie Canal to Lake Ontario—Ithaca was poised to become a major shipping hub, a center of commerce. So on a mid-April day in 1828 a young Ezra walked down the hill into town, betting that it was the sort of place where a man unafraid of hard work and hard times could make a name for himself. That name, of course, is everywhere now: on sweatshirts and buildings, diplomas and buses, a dairy bar and a particle accelerator. It’s on a tech campus on NYC’s Roosevelt Island, a medical college in Qatar, a marine research station off the coast of Maine. Ezra Cornell always had big dreams; still, one suspects that on that fateful day nearly two centuries ago, even he couldn’t possibly have imagined how far his name would spread. Most Cornellians are familiar with the founder’s image: his profile graces the University’s Great Seal, and his statue sits on the Arts Quad opposite that of inaugural President A.D. White. We call him “Ezra,” like a favorite uncle. We know that he grew up poor, got rich in the telegraph business, and used that money to endow a certain institution far above Cayuga’s waters where “any person can find instruction in any study.” Those are the highlights; the details are even more interesting. Most Cornellians are familiar with the founder’s image; his statue sits on the Arts Quad opposite that of inaugural President A.D. White. We call him “Ezra,” like a favorite uncle. Ezra Cornell wasn’t just an American success story: he was also a failure. He was a loving husband, an attentive father, a lapsed Quaker, a politician, a lousy manager, a brilliant engineer, a civic booster, a rabid book collector, a self-taught aficionado of animal husbandry. He could walk 40 miles a day with ease. In an era of robber barons, he gave away a fortune. With White, he founded a university whose commitment to inclusivity, though the norm today, was at the time radical to the point of scandalous. He was both a man of his time and a man before it. “Everybody talks about him as ‘rough,’” says former history lecturer Carol Kammen, author of Cornell: Glorious to View. “One early student said Ezra was not a handshaking man. What that seems to mean is that he wasn’t a man you walked up to and said, ‘Hey, Ezra!’ He was a man of few words. He’s been described as dour. He’s also been described as a loving father. He adored his wife. So I think you have many Ezra Cornells.” He was a man of few words. He’s been described as dour. He’s also been described as a loving father. He adored his wife. So I think you have many Ezra Cornells. Historian Carol Kammen He’s been the subject of several biographies, including True and Firm, a paean published by his eldest son in 1884; the equally adoring Ezra Cornell: A Character Study by Albert Smith (1934); and The Builder (1952), a dense and surprisingly entertaining book by Philip Dorf 1924. There’s little tangible evidence left in Ithaca of Ezra’s day-to-day life, no place that can claim “the founder slept here” (except, perhaps, his tomb in Sage Chapel). The house just north of Fall Creek where he and his wife raised their family, a humble cottage known as the Nook, is long gone, as is Forest Park, the farmhouse at the bottom of Libe Slope where they moved when their fortunes improved, and the brick house at the corner of Tioga and Seneca streets where Ezra spent the last years of his life. The future benefactor and his family spent years living in the Nook, a cottage near Fall Creek. The library he endowed for the citizens of Ithaca, his first major philanthropic project, fell victim to urban renewal in the 1950s. Llenroc, the mansion now home to Delta Phi fraternity, was still incomplete when Ezra died in 1874—and building such an ornate Gothic villa never did seem in keeping with his character. The original University buildings—Morrill, McGraw, and White, made of sturdy gray stone—were Ezra’s creations, and strolling past their façades may be the closest one can come to walking in his footsteps. To get inside his head requires a trip to the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, where the founder’s papers are kept—more than 60 cubic feet of boxes filled with thousands of documents (some of which are available online). In an era before the telephone—and before the telegraph that would transform Ezra’s life—letters were the way the itinerant businessman kept in touch with his family. The bygone library was Ezra's first philanthropic project. He writes of minor household matters and major national issues, of the cost of meals and the evils of slavery. His handwriting is even, inelegant, and (to the modern eye, at least) often impenetrable. “I can assure you my Dear that I breathe freer and deeper than I have done for some time past,” Ezra wrote to his wife in October 1843, when he was first finding success in the telegraph trade. “I feel as though Old Dame Fortune was bestirring herself to make amends as far as may be for her past neglect, but I am cool.” Ezra Cornell was born on January 11, 1807, in Westchester Landing, NY (now the Bronx). His father, Elijah Cornell, had been raised on a farm and apprenticed to a potter; his mother, née Eunice Barnard, was the daughter of a New England sea captain. Ezra was their first child (they would have 11, all surviving to adulthood), and by the time he was a toddler the family had suffered a financial reversal: a ship in which Elijah and his brother had invested much of their money sank on its maiden voyage. The Cornells went west to DeRuyter, where they bought a 150-acre farm; they moved several times before settling there for good in 1819. Elijah opened a pottery, and between helping his father there and working on the farm, Ezra had little time for school. I feel as though Old Dame Fortune was bestirring herself to make amends as far as may be for her past neglect, but I am cool. Ezra, on finding success in the telegraph business “I think, to a certain extent, he was so dedicated to learning because he didn’t have those opportunities himself,” says University Archivist Emerita Elaine Deutsch Engst, MA ’72. “To his family, education was a luxury. But you get the sense that he had an insatiable curiosity, that he was interested in everything.” There are plenty of stories that reveal the hardworking young Ezra, the studious and industrious Ezra. When he was a boy, a peddler came to the door, and Ezra longed for a biography of Andrew Jackson; his mother allowed him to have it as long as he collected rags from around the house to make up the price. In the summer of 1824, when the contractor his father had hired to build a new pottery made a mistake in crafting the frame, it was the 17-year-old Ezra who braved his ire by pointing it out. He was just a year older when he built a new house for the family, cutting the timber and designing it himself. The following year, he set out for Syracuse. “He was an enterprising young man, a clever young man,” Kammen says. “He was mechanically inclined, in that he could look at a problem and figure it out.” There’s also a vision of Ezra as a Zelig-like character—a man who comes from obscurity and intersects with history. Ezra's mother, Eunice Barnard Cornell. Turning a corner in New York City, he happened upon Abraham Lincoln in mid-oratory, and later attended the president’s first inauguration. While delivering supplies to Union troops from Tompkins County, he found himself caught up in the first Battle of Bull Run. He went to Maine to sell plows—and wound up an instrumental figure in the founding of the American telegraph industry. When Ezra came to Ithaca at age 21, writes Carl Becker in Cornell University: Founders and the Founding, he was “a tall, angular, physically powerful man.” Stories You May Like A Conversation with Life Trustee Ezra Cornell ’70, BS ’71 Are You an Ezra—or an Andrew? Becker parses a photo of Ezra taken at the time, noting his large head, high cheekbones, carefully brushed dark hair, and well-shaped forehead. I think, to a certain extent, he was so dedicated to learning because he didn’t have those opportunities himself. To his family, education was a luxury. University Archivist Emerita Elaine Deutsch Engst, MA ’72 It is, he writes, “altogether a face that reveals character—the self-reliance of a man who has learned to take it, who proposes to meet without fear or elation a world that he knows to be exacting and unromantic, and to make the most of whatever it may have to offer to one upon whom Fortune has conferred no extraneous favors, no favors at all except good health, tempered courage, and sound common sense.” Ezra’s first job in Ithaca was as a carpenter. He eventually became a mechanic at Otis Eddy’s cotton mill on Cascadilla Creek, then was hired to overhaul Jeremiah Beebe’s plaster mill on Fall Creek. The year 1831 was a big one: he completed a tunnel he’d designed to better power Beebe’s mill, blasting through the rock so accurately that when the two ends met they were off by only a few inches. That same year, he married Mary Ann Wood, the daughter of a Dryden farmer. It was, Engst says, “absolutely a love match.” And a religiously mixed marriage: she was Episcopalian. With wife Mary Ann and daughter Emma, circa 1857. “His family were quite serious Quakers,” Engst says. “Marrying Mary Ann was a major step. He gets a letter where his parents are horrified and they tell him he can’t come back to the Quaker meeting. About a year later, they write back and say, ‘Maybe we’ll change our minds if you apologize.’ And he writes this letter saying, ‘I won’t apologize—this is the best thing I ever did.’” The couple’s first child—Alonzo, who would serve a term as governor of New York—was born in 1834. Ezra and Mary Ann would have nine children, five of whom would live to adulthood. (Three sons died in infancy, and a daughter—Elizabeth, a smart and vivacious girl whom Ezra adored—lived to 14.) In 1839, after Beebe sold his mill, Ezra was out of a job. He turned to farming and real estate investment, becoming active in local agricultural affairs. By 1841, he’d become prominent enough to be named a swine judge at the state fair. The University owns the device that was used to receive the first-ever telegraph message in 1844. The following year, with the town’s prosperity on the wane, he bought the rights to sell a new kind of plow in Maine and Georgia and hit the road—walking 160 miles to Albany to catch a train to Boston. He wouldn’t return to Ithaca permanently for the better part of two decades. “He took terrible risks,” Kammen says. “Any sensible man would have stayed home and taken care of his family. He went off, and the question is why. I think he was somewhat restless and opportunities in Ithaca were limited. He believed he would get rich someday, and it wasn’t going to happen here.” Kammen recites her favorite line from Becker’s book: “Above all he was not a prudent man intent upon a small security; or a vain man living in the opinion of others and vulnerable to ridicule; or a self-regarding man reluctant to expose himself by going out on a limb.” Above all he was not a prudent man intent upon a small security; or a vain man living in the opinion of others and vulnerable to ridicule; or a self-regarding man reluctant to expose himself by going out on a limb. Carl Becker, Cornell University: Founders and the Founding Georgia proved to be a failure. In addition to viewing the horrors of slavery firsthand, Ezra found the state to be arid sales ground. But Maine was a fateful destination: it was there that he met F.O.J. Smith, publisher of the Maine Farmer. In July 1843, he walked into Smith’s office to find him on the floor, working with a plowmaker to design a machine to dig a trench for burying telegraph wire; Smith had been contracted by Samuel Morse to lay 40 miles of test pipe from Baltimore to Washington. A drawing that Ezra submitted as part of his patent application for a device to bury telegraph wire. Ezra took up the challenge, designing a gizmo that not only dug the requisite trench but refilled it afterward. He had stumbled onto the ground floor of a communications revolution. “The telegraph,” Engst observes, “was the Internet of the 19th century.” The telegraph hardly made Ezra’s fortune overnight. There were technological snafus (the shoddy insulation degraded underground, prompting Ezra to design insulators for use on poles); political problems (many of his better-educated colleagues dismissed him outright); and umpteen economic reversals. Hardworking, tenacious, and clever though he was, Ezra was no business genius. While some of his investments proved to be brilliant, others were questionable or outright bad; his photolithography and steelworks firms foundered and his railroad interests didn’t pay off. He gambled on the long-awaited Sodus Canal, which never materialized. He was often buried under a mountain of debt. On the road, he was sometimes so cash-poor that he had to ask his wife to pay the postage on his letters. Back home, she often relied on her farmer father to keep the family provisioned. Eventually, of course, his belief in the telegraph industry paid off spectacularly. Ezra had formed his own companies and invested in others, joining the Babel of disparate firms competing to bring the new technology to an expanding nation. When various firms were combined to create Western Union, Ezra found himself the new enterprise’s largest stockholder—going from bankruptcy to great wealth within days. As a child, he’d sewn together sheets of paper to make a “cyphering book,” practicing his sums and calculating compound interest. On August 29, 1864, he opened it again and wrote, “The yearly income which I realize this year will exceed one hundred thousand dollars.” Ezra's 1868 photo, so familiar to Cornellians. That translates into something like $2 million in 2025. But even more striking is what he wrote next: “My greatest care now is how to spend this large income, to do the most good.” Ezra’s great-great-great-grandson, Ezra Cornell ’70, ascribes his ancestor’s beneficence, in part, to the humble background that made him a proponent of the Golden Rule. “He looked for fairness in a world which was obviously difficult,” says Cornell, who represents the family as a University trustee for life. “So when he discovered he had wealth, I don’t think there was any greed in the man. It was all about, ‘How can I make this a better country, how can I give back to society?’” He looked for fairness in a world which was obviously difficult. So when he discovered he had wealth, I don’t think there was any greed in the man. University trustee Ezra Cornell ’70 Ezra had always been a strong proponent of education; he’d helped found the State Agricultural College at Ovid, which opened in 1860 but closed the following year due to student enlistment in the Civil War. Then, while serving in the State Senate, he met a young colleague who was burning to reform the American university system: Andrew Dickson White, a Yale-educated son of privilege. Ezra had the money; White had the academic bona fides; both had the visionary ideas and drive to pull it off. On the University’s opening day in 1868, Ezra told the crowd that although they’d come expecting to see a finished university, what was in front of them was just the beginning. The Ezra statue on the Arts Quad was dedicated in 1919, part of ongoing celebrations marking the University's 50th anniversary. He imagined that someday, Cornell would educate as many as 5,000 students at a time; today the number tops 26,000. “Ezra would love it,” Kammen says of today’s Cornell. “He’d love the industry, because these kids work hard. He’d love the diversity of subjects, the practicality, the sense of purpose. Cornell University has always been in a process of becoming—and Ezra would understand that.” Top: Ezra in 1845 on a background of his writing; photo illustration by Caitlin Cook / Cornell University. (All images in this story courtesy of Rare and Manuscript Collections.) Published January 10, 2025 Comments Madaliso Daka, Class of 2020 11 Jan, 2025 This write up is so beautiful, bringing to light the human and practical aspects that went into how this institution of learning came to be. The story of Ezra is a good story of resilience, and encourages one to keep dreaming. It embodies what I learnt at Cornell; that any person can go on to do great and be great. Reply Susan Anderson, Class of 1961 11 Jan, 2025 Happy Birthday great great great grandfather. So many of your traits have been handed down to my grandfather Perry Cornell Goodspeed, father Perry Cornell Goodpeed Jr., brother Perry Cornell Goodspeed III, and nephew Perry Cornell Goodspeed IV. Reply Susan Rockford Bittker, Class of 1966 11 Jan, 2025 Thank you for posting this. It is important to know our background so we can appreciate and understand what we have today. Reply Daniel Kunkel, Class of 1992 11 Jan, 2025 It is a special place, in so many respects, but mostly to learn. Thanks to a special founder! Reply Kojo DeGraft-Hanson, Class of 2009 11 Jan, 2025 Great read, and very inspiring. A timely reminder that our progress in life is rarely linear or instant. Thank you for the lesson, Uncle Ezra! Reply Leave a Comment Cancel replyOnce your comment is approved, your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *Comment * Name * Class Year Email * Save my name, email, and class year in this browser for the next time I comment. Δ Other stories You may like Alumni Preserving Central Park, Manhattan’s Urban Oasis Cornelliana Take a Bough: Slope’s Iconic Tree Long Predates Ezra Alumni With Her Name Restored, Alum Can Again Say ‘Yes’ to the Dresses