{"id":45954,"date":"2025-01-10T09:03:03","date_gmt":"2025-01-10T14:03:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alumni.cornell.edu\/cornellians\/?p=45954"},"modified":"2025-01-28T16:47:02","modified_gmt":"2025-01-28T21:47:02","slug":"ezra-biography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alumni.cornell.edu\/cornellians\/ezra-biography\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Good Health, Tempered Courage, and Sound Common Sense\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Those are the gifts that fate gave Ezra Cornell, per one historian. Here’s a look at his life\u2014from humble beginnings to great wealth<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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By Beth Saulnier<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Syracuse, he found work as a carpenter, but he didn\u2019t stay long; within a week he\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
A vintage engraving depicting the tunnel that Ezra blasted through Fall Creek Gorge to power a nearby mill.<\/figcaption><\/figure>
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With the expansion of the railroads\u2014and the imminent building of the Sodus Canal to connect the Erie Canal to Lake Ontario\u2014it was poised to become a major shipping hub, a center of commerce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That name, of course, is everywhere now: on sweatshirts and buildings, diplomas and buses, a dairy bar and a particle accelerator. It\u2019s on a tech campus on NYC\u2019s Roosevelt Island, a medical college in Qatar, a marine research station off the coast of Maine.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Ezra Cornell<\/a> always had big dreams; still, one suspects that on that fateful day nearly two centuries ago, even he couldn\u2019t possibly have imagined how far his name would spread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most Cornellians are familiar with the founder\u2019s image: his profile graces the University\u2019s Great Seal, and his statue sits on the Arts Quad opposite that of inaugural President A.D. White. We call him \u201cEzra,\u201d like a favorite uncle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s waters where \u201cany person can find instruction in any study.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those are the highlights; the details are even more interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most Cornellians are familiar with the founder\u2019s image; his statue sits on the Arts Quad opposite that of inaugural President A.D. White. We call him \u201cEzra,\u201d like a favorite uncle.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ezra Cornell wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEverybody talks about him as \u2018rough,\u2019\u201d says former history lecturer Carol Kammen, author of Cornell: Glorious to View.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne early student said Ezra was not a handshaking man. What that seems to mean is that he wasn\u2019t a man you walked up to and said, \u2018Hey, Ezra!\u2019 He was a man of few words. He\u2019s been described as dour. He\u2019s also been described as a loving father. He adored his wife. So I think you have many Ezra Cornells.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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He was a man of few words. He\u2019s been described as dour. He\u2019s also been described as a loving father. He adored his wife. So I think you have many Ezra Cornells.<\/p>\nHistorian Carol Kammen<\/strong><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

He\u2019s been the subject of several biographies, including True and Firm<\/a><\/em>, a paean published by his eldest son in 1884; the equally adoring Ezra Cornell: A Character Study<\/em> by Albert Smith (1934); and The Builder<\/em> (1952), a dense and surprisingly entertaining book by Philip Dorf 1924.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s little tangible evidence left in Ithaca of Ezra\u2019s day-to-day life, no place that can claim \u201cthe founder slept here\u201d (except, perhaps, his tomb in Sage Chapel).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\""The
The future benefactor and his family spent years living in the Nook, a cottage near Fall Creek.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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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\u2014and building such an ornate Gothic villa never did seem in keeping with his character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The original University buildings\u2014Morrill, McGraw, and White, made of sturdy gray stone\u2014were Ezra\u2019s creations, and strolling past their fa\u00e7ades may be the closest one can come to walking in his footsteps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To get inside his head requires a trip to the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, where the founder\u2019s papers<\/a> are kept\u2014more than 60 cubic feet of boxes filled with thousands of documents (some of which are available online).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an era before the telephone\u2014and before the telegraph that would transform Ezra\u2019s life\u2014letters were the way the itinerant businessman kept in touch with his family. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"An
The bygone library was Ezra’s first philanthropic project.<\/figcaption><\/figure>
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He writes of minor household matters and major national issues, of the cost of meals and the evils of slavery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His handwriting is even, inelegant, and (to the modern eye, at least) often impenetrable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI can assure you my Dear that I breathe freer and deeper than I have done for some time past,\u201d Ezra wrote to his wife in October 1843, when he was first finding success in the telegraph trade. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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, n\u00e9e Eunice Barnard, was the daughter of a New England sea captain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\nEzra<\/strong>, on finding success in the telegraph business<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think, to a certain extent, he was so dedicated to learning because he didn\u2019t have those opportunities himself,\u201d says University Archivist Emerita Elaine Deutsch Engst, MA \u201972. \u201cTo his family, education was a luxury. But you get the sense that he had an insatiable curiosity, that he was interested in everything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are plenty of stories that reveal the hardworking young Ezra, the studious and industrious Ezra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following year, he set out for Syracuse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe was an enterprising young man, a clever young man,\u201d Kammen says. \u201cHe was mechanically inclined, in that he could look at a problem and figure it out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s also a vision of Ezra as a Zelig-like character\u2014a man who comes from obscurity and intersects with history. <\/p>\n<\/div>

\"Ezra's
Ezra’s mother, Eunice Barnard Cornell.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Turning a corner in New York City, he happened upon Abraham Lincoln in mid-oratory, and later attended the president\u2019s first inauguration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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\u2014and wound up an instrumental figure in the founding of the American telegraph industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Ezra came to Ithaca at age 21, writes Carl Becker in Cornell University: Founders and the Founding<\/a><\/em>, he was \u201ca tall, angular, physically powerful man.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Becker parses a photo of Ezra taken at the time, noting his large head, high cheekbones, carefully brushed dark hair, and well-shaped forehead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I think, to a certain extent, he was so dedicated to learning because he didn\u2019t have those opportunities himself. To his family, education was a luxury.<\/p>\nUniversity Archivist Emerita Elaine Deutsch Engst, MA \u201972<\/strong><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It is, he writes, \u201caltogether a face that reveals character\u2014the 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ezra\u2019s first job in Ithaca was as a carpenter. He eventually became a mechanic at Otis Eddy\u2019s cotton mill on Cascadilla Creek, then was hired to overhaul Jeremiah Beebe\u2019s plaster mill on Fall Creek.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The year 1831 was a big one: he completed a tunnel he\u2019d designed to better power Beebe\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was, Engst says, \u201cabsolutely a love match.\u201d And a religiously mixed marriage: she was Episcopalian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Ezra
With wife Mary Ann and daughter Emma, circa 1857.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHis family were quite serious Quakers,\u201d Engst says. \u201cMarrying Mary Ann was a major step. He gets a letter where his parents are horrified and they tell him he can\u2019t come back to the Quaker meeting. About a year later, they write back and say, \u2018Maybe we\u2019ll change our minds if you apologize.\u2019 And he writes this letter saying, \u2018I won\u2019t apologize\u2014this is the best thing I ever did.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The couple\u2019s first child\u2014Alonzo, who would serve a term as governor of New York\u2014was born in 1834. Ezra and Mary Ann would have nine children, five of whom would live to adulthood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Three sons died in infancy, and a daughter\u2014Elizabeth, a smart and vivacious girl whom Ezra adored\u2014lived to 14.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019d become prominent enough to be named a swine judge at the state fair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
The University owns the device that was used to receive the first-ever telegraph message in 1844.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The following year, with the town\u2019s prosperity on the wane, he bought the rights to sell a new kind of plow in Maine and Georgia and hit the road\u2014walking 160 miles to Albany to catch a train to Boston. He wouldn\u2019t return to Ithaca permanently for the better part of two decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe took terrible risks,\u201d Kammen says. \u201cAny 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\u2019t going to happen here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kammen recites her favorite line from Becker\u2019s book: \u201cAbove 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n Carl Becker<\/strong>, Cornell University: Founders and the Founding<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Georgia proved to be a failure. In addition to viewing the horrors of slavery firsthand, Ezra found the state to be arid sales ground. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Maine was a fateful destination: it was there that he met F.O.J. Smith, publisher of the Maine Farmer<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In July 1843, he walked into Smith\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"A
A drawing that Ezra submitted as part of his patent application for a device to bury telegraph wire.<\/figcaption><\/figure>
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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe telegraph,\u201d Engst observes, \u201cwas the Internet of the 19th century.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The telegraph hardly made Ezra\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hardworking, tenacious, and clever though he was, Ezra was no business genius. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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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\u2019t pay off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually, of course, his belief in the telegraph industry paid off spectacularly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When various firms were combined to create Western Union, Ezra found himself the new enterprise\u2019s largest stockholder\u2014going from bankruptcy to great wealth within days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a child, he\u2019d sewn together sheets of paper to make a \u201ccyphering book,\u201d practicing his sums and calculating compound interest. On August 29, 1864, he opened it again and wrote, \u201cThe yearly income which I realize this year will exceed one hundred thousand dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Ezra
Ezra’s 1868 photo, so familiar to Cornellians.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

That translates into something like $2 million in 2025. But even more striking is what he wrote next: \u201cMy greatest care now is how to spend this large income, to do the most good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ezra\u2019s great-great-great-grandson, Ezra Cornell \u201970, ascribes his ancestor\u2019s beneficence, in part, to the humble background that made him a proponent of the Golden Rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe looked for fairness in a world which was obviously difficult,\u201d says Cornell, who represents the family as a University trustee for life. \u201cSo when he discovered he had wealth, I don\u2019t think there was any greed in the man. It was all about, \u2018How can I make this a better country, how can I give back to society?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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He looked for fairness in a world which was obviously difficult. So when he discovered he had wealth, I don\u2019t think there was any greed in the man.<\/p>\nUniversity trustee Ezra Cornell \u201970<\/strong><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Ezra had always been a strong proponent of education; he\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the University\u2019s opening day in 1868, Ezra told the crowd that although they\u2019d come expecting to see a finished university, what was in front of them was just the beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
The Ezra statue on the Arts Quad was dedicated in 1919, part of ongoing celebrations marking the University’s 50th anniversary.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

He imagined that someday, Cornell would educate as many as 5,000 students at a time; today the number tops 26,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEzra would love it,\u201d Kammen says of today\u2019s Cornell. \u201cHe\u2019d love the industry, because these kids work hard. He\u2019d love the diversity of subjects, the practicality, the sense of purpose. Cornell University has always been in a process of becoming\u2014and Ezra would understand that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Published January 10, 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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