George Peabody

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George Peabody (ca.1860)

George Peabody (born February 18, 1795 in Danvers , Massachusetts , † November 4, 1869 in London ) was a businessman and investment banker and the greatest philanthropist of his time in the United States and Great Britain .

Life

Peabody was born into a poor family in rural Massachusetts. His parents could not finance him an academic education, at the age of 11 he started an apprenticeship with the owner of a general store. There he proved to be attentive, intelligent and ambitious, learned bookkeeping and how to deal with people in a commercially skilled manner. At the age of 15 he successfully completed his apprenticeship, two years later he was running a shop with his brother in Georgetown in the District of Columbia , but it burned down. Through clever investments he achieved an unprecedented social rise over the next five decades, in the sense of the phrase from rags to riches .

In the British-American War (1812-1814) he served as a volunteer. In 1816 he moved to Baltimore and opened a wholesale business with Elisha Riggs with dry goods such as B. cereals, sugar and tea. Their offices were in the Old Congress Hall on Baltimore and Sharp Streets. Baltimore was his hometown for the next 20 years. They soon opened branches in Philadelphia and New York and made a small fortune. Looking for further business opportunities, George Peabody traveled to England in 1827 to buy goods and negotiate the sale of American cotton in Lancashire. In 1847 he withdrew from the company with Riggs and settled permanently in London, where he lived until his death.

With the help of Brown Brothers and Nathan Mayer Rothschild , Peabody founded his banking house George Peabody & Co. in England in 1835. In 1854 he took on Junius Morgan as a partner. They specialized in foreign exchange and American securities trading. John Pierpont Morgan later did his apprenticeship here. The company Duncan, Sherman & Co. were their representatives in America. From 1861 on, Peabody was the world's largest trader in American securities.

During his London years, his bank, Peabody & Company, financed the expansion of the American railways westwards and the laying of the first transatlantic cables, making a large fortune. Because Peabody had no family or children himself, when he retired in 1864, he allowed Junius Morgan to change the company name to the Junius S. Morgan Company. Morgan's company was run from London. John Pierpont Morgan spent a lot of time in the wonderful house in Prince's Gate.

Charity

Peabody was responsible for the upbringing of his nephew Othniel Charles Marsh , who received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University in 1860 . It was at Marsh's urging that in 1866 Peabody donated $ 150,000 to the construction of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History . That same year, Peabody gave the same amount to Harvard University , where the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology was founded.

After the Civil War he founded the Peabody Education Fund "to promote the intellectual, moral, and manual training of the destitute children of the southern states". He stated that the entire population should benefit from this fund "without any further distinction than their needs and the possibilities of using them."

He appointed a board of directors to manage the endowment fund:

Robert Winthrop was elected chairman. The Trustees selected Barnas Sears as their general agent .

Peabody donated more than $ 8 million to charities, particularly to improve education. He spent $ 1,250,000 on establishing and maintaining the Peabody Institute in Baltimore.

The Peabody Institute in Danvers was earmarked for a library and lecture room of $ 20,000. He raised the amount to $ 43,000. The total amount donated to the institute is believed to have been $ 200,000. In honor of Peabody, the citizens of the city have named the part of town in which he was born the name Peabody.

In 1857 he set up an institute in Baltimore to promote the city's cultural life. Today the Peabody Institute is a music conservatory .

The Peabody Library Building, which opened in 1878, was designed by the English-born architect Edmund George Lind, in collaboration with the Institute's first provost, Nathaniel H. Morison . Supported by six rows of splendid cast-iron columns, over five stories with decorative grids and classic decorations with gilded leaves, the room is 18.5 m (61 ft) high from the black and white marble floor to the translucent ceiling. The space is exquisite symmetry in the neo-Greek style. The ironwork was carried out by the Bartlett-Robbins company. The construction cost was $ 400,000. The Peabody Library remained part of the Peabody Institute until 1966 when the collection was transferred to the City of Baltimore and administered as a division of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. The collection was transferred again in 1982, this time to Johns Hopkins University. The George Peabody Library is now part of the Special Collections Division of the University Sheridan Libraries.

He encouraged his Baltimore friends to found Johns Hopkins University ( Johns Hopkins ), the Enoch Pratt Free Library ( Enoch Pratt ) and the Walters Art Gallery ( Henry Walters ).

In 1867 he donated $ 140,000 which was used to establish the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem . He donated $ 25,000 to Phillips Academy , Andover, and the same amount went to Kenyon College , Ohio; $ 13,000 went to the Newbury Public Library and $ 20,000 each to the Massachusetts and Maryland Historic Societies.

The most significant donation, however, was the $ 1 million donation to found a co-educational school for teacher training in Nashville , Tennessee.

Congress thanked Peabody on March 15, 1867 by ordering a gold medal. It is kept in the library in the Peabody area.

Because Congress  had refused to finance US participation in this “speculative business” - the London World's Fair - the American exhibits were already packed in boxes in the docks of London while the British press patted scorns at the former colonies. George Peabody, in recognition of the importance of his country, cut a fine figure by unceremoniously taking £ 3,000 (about $ 15,000) of his own funds to display the American exhibits for the World's Fair at Crystal Palace . His investment had paid off. The interest in the American exhibition was immense as people flocked to see Samuel Colt revolvers, Cyrus McCormick mowers, fine daguerreotypes and other wonders.

Peabody's philanthropic activity in the UK began after the World's Fair. One exhibit at the World's Fair, erected outside the Crystal Palace grounds, was a model house for the working class. Comfortable housing for the rapidly growing urban population attracted Prince Albert's particular interest , and that influenced George Peabody. He founded the Peabody Donation Fund , which to this day continues to give housing grants to the working class in London. All of his charitable activities were aimed at the betterment of society. He placed the sum of £ 150,000 ($ 750,000) in the hands of the caretakers and later increased the amount to £ 500,000 ($ 2,500,000) for his noble cause. The fund grew on the interest and has grown 3% over the years. Lord Stanley , fur trader Curtis Miranda Lampson , Mr. Junius S. Morgan, Mr. Horatio G. Somerby were the worthy stewards. At the end of 1906, the fund had made money available for 12,328 rooms in 5,469 separate apartments at 20 locations.

Queen Victoria wanted to give him the Great Bath Order or a Baronet title; Peabody refused both. It was painted with the Queen's letter of thanks in his hands. A statue was made from this painting and stood in London's financial district and a replica is in Baltimore.

Peabody died in London on the evening of November 4th, 1869. At the request of the Dean of Westminster and with the consent of the Queen and the People of London, a funeral was held at Westminster Abbey . Queen Victoria followed the hearse to Westminster Abbey, where Peabody was laid out in full honor (the first American to be so honored). By order of Prime Minister Gladstone , the newest ship in Her Majesty's fleet, the HMS Monarch, brought Peabody's remains to his final resting place in Salem, Massachusetts.

The district of his birth was later renamed Peabody.

literature

Web links

Commons : George Peabody  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Brown Brothers
  2. ^ Carl Hovey: The life story of J. Pierpont Morgan; a biography . . Sturgis & Walton, New York 1911
  3. ↑ Transatlantic Cable
  4. ↑ Othniel Charles Marsh biography
  5. ^ Edmund George Lind - Biography
  6. ^ Memorial of Nathaniel Holmes Morison (1815–1890) first provost of the Peabody institute (1867–1890) Privately printed. 1892
  7. ^ Enoch Pratt Free Library
  8. ^ LO Howard: Biographical Memoir of Edward Sylvester Morse 1838-1925 . In: National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. XVII, p. 6.
  9. ↑ George Peabody College for Teachers; its function, September, 1912
  10. ↑ City of Peabody official website
personal data
SURNAME Peabody, George
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American entrepreneur and philanthropist
DATE OF BIRTH February 18, 1795
PLACE OF BIRTH South Danvers , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH November 4, 1869
Place of death London