Henry Villard

Henry Villard
Born	April 10, 1835(1835-04-10) Speyer, Rhenish Bavaria
Died	November 12, 1900 (aged 65)

Henry Villard (April 10, 1835 – November 12, 1900) was an American journalist and financier who was an early president of the Northern Pacific Railway.

Early life and education

He was born in Speyer, Palatinate, Kingdom of Bavaria. His baptismal name was Ferdinand Heinrich Gustav Hilgard. His parents moved to Zweibrücken in 1839, and in 1856 his father, Gustav Leonhard Hilgard (who died in 1867), became a justice of the Supreme Court of Bavaria, at Munich. Henry Villard went to Gymnasium (equivalent of "high school") in Zweibrücken, which he had to leave because he sympathized with the revolution. He then continued his education at the French semi-military academy in Phalsbourg (1849-50), at the Gymnasium of Speyer in 1850-52, and at the universities of Munich and Würzburg in 1852-53. In Munich he was a member of the student fraternity Corps Franconia. In 1853, having had a disagreement with his father, he emigrated — without his parents' knowledge — to the United States. Through his further life he kept close ties to his home country. In Speyer he was a main benefactor for the construction of the Memorial Church and a new hospital and in Zweibrücken he built an orphanage. In Speyer he is still known as Heinrich Hilgard, where a street is named after him (Hilgardstrasse). He has been honoured with the freedom of the city and there is a bust of him on the compound of the Speyer Diakonissen Hospital.

Journalism

On emigrating to America, he adopted the name Villard. Making his way westward in 1854, he lived in turn at Cincinnati; Belleville, Illinois; Peoria, Illinois and Chicago, did newspaper reporting and various jobs, and in 1856 attempted unsuccessfully to establish a colony of "free soil" Germans in Kansas. In 1856-57 he was editor, and for part of the time was proprietor, of the Racine Volksblatt, in which he advocated the election of John C. Fremont, a (Republican). Thereafter he was associated (in 1857) with the Staats-Zeitung, Frank Leslie's, the New York Tribune, and with the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette. He reported on the Lincoln-Douglas debates for the New York papers. He was correspondent of the New York Herald in 1861. During the Civil War, he was correspondent for the New York Tribune (with the Army of the Potomac, 1862-63) and was at the front as the representative of a news agency established by him in that year at Washington (1864). In 1865 he became Washington correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, and in 1866 was the correspondent of that paper in the Prusso-Austrian War.

At the close of the war he married Helen Frances Garrison, the daughter of the anti-slavery campaigner, William Lloyd Garrison, on January 3, 1866.

Transportation

Oregon and Transcontinental stock owned by Henry Villard

During the Panic of 1873, he acted as agent for holders of Western railroad securities and soon turned to railroad financing as the economy recovered. The Pacific Northwest was the booming sector of American expansion. In Oregon, Villard gained such a strong position in the transportation field that he was able to obtain a controlling interest in the Northern Pacific Railway and became (1881) its president. As the University of Oregon's first benefactor, he had Villard Hall, the second building on campus, named after him.^[1] Building the line across the Northern Rockies temporarily bankrupted him, but, refinanced, he bounced back.^[2]

In New York, he gained control of the New York Post and merged smaller companies to form the Edison General Electric Company, the forebear of General Electric. He was its president until 1893.

More Journalism

In 1881 he acquired the New York Evening Post and the Nation.

Philanthropy

In 1883 he paid the debt of the state university of Oregon, and gave to the institution $50,000. He also gave the town of Zweibrücken an orphan asylum in 1891.

Death

On his passing in 1900, Henry Villard was interred in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York. His autobiography was published posthumously, in 1904.

Literature

• Memoirs of Henry Villard (three volumes, Boston, 1904)
• The Early History of Transportation in Oregon Edited by Oswald Garrison Villard (University of Oregon Press, 1944)

See also

• Oswald Garrison Villard
• Villard Houses

References

•  "Villard, Henry". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911. 
• This article incorporates text from an edition of the New International Encyclopedia that is in the public domain.

1. ^ University of Oregon (2004). "Villard Hall". Oregon Photo Tour. http://www.uoregon.edu/photo_archives/2004gallery/_winter/villard_hall.html. Retrieved 2007-01-22. 
2. ^ "Henry Villard Is Dead—Capitalist and promoter expires at his country home". New York Times. November 13, 1900. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9E03E6DF113AE132A05750C1A9679D946197D6CF. Retrieved 2008-02-29. 

Further reading

• Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave; John Cullen (2001). Villard: The Life and Times of an American Titan. New York: Doubleday. 

External links

• Brief biography of Henry Villard
• Helmut Schwab, "Henry Villard": a more detailed biography