Matthew Vassar

Matthew Vassar (April 29, 1792 – June 23, 1868) was an English-born American brewer and merchant. He founded the eponymous Vassar College in 1861. He was a cousin of John Ellison Vassar.^[1]

Background

He was born in East Dereham, Norfolk, England. In 1796, he emigrated with his family to New York and settled on a farm near Poughkeepsie. When Vassar was 14 years old, his parents had him apprenticed to a tanner.

Business career

One day before he was to begin his apprenticeship, he ran away to Newburgh, New York, subsequently entering the brewing business. He took over his family's small brewery at the age of eighteen. Over the next several decades he developed his Poughkeepsie brewery into one of the country's largest, by the 1830s becoming perhaps the first to achieve nationwide distribution to every state and amassing a sizable personal fortune in the process.^{[citation needed]}

Vassar College

Lydia Booth, a niece of Matthew Vassar, encouraged him to establish a women's colleges in the United States, which would be located in Poughkeepsie. In January 1861, the New York Legislature passed an act to incorporate Vassar College, one of the first women's colleges in the U.S. On February 26, 1861, Matthew Vassar presented the college's Board of Trustees with a tin box, containing half of his fortune, $408,000 (approximately $8,400,000 in 2005 dollars) and a deed of conveyance for 200 acres (0.81 km²) of land to establish the campus.^[2]On June 23, 1868, Vassar delivered his farewell address to the Vassar College Board of Trustees; he died in the middle of delivering the eleventh page of the speech.^{[citation needed]} In a bill enacted on July 15, 1870, the U.S. Congress waived any tax claim(s) to the donation to the college.^[3]

Legacy

Matthew Vassar's home, Springside, located south of Poughkeepsie, is a National Historic Landmark.

References

1. ^ New International Encyclopedia
2. ^ History of Vassar College
3. ^ Chapter 312, Laws of 1870

Sources

• Gregg Smith, Beer in America: The Early Years--1587-1840 (Boulder, CO: Siris Books, 1998)
• This article incorporates text from the public domain Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography.

External links

• Brief Biography from Vassar College

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