Jane Stanford

Jane Stanford

Jane Eliza Lathrop Stanford (born August 25, 1828 in Albany (New York) , † February 28, 1905 in Honolulu , Hawaii ) was an American philanthropist . She founded with her husband, Leland Stanford as a memorial to their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., the Stanford University .

life and work

Stanford was the third of seven children of merchant Dyer Lathrop and Jane Ann Shields. She was home raised and briefly attended the Albany Female Academy. In 1850 she married the lawyer Leland Stanford in Albany and they lived in Port Washington, where her husband established a law firm. After a fire destroyed their property in 1852, they returned to Albany. Her husband joined his five brothers in Sacramento , California, and sold supplies to California gold rush miners. Jane was forced to live with her parents and take care of her sick father. In 1855, after the death of Jane's father, Leland Stanford returned to Albany and they traveled to California together. In 1856 they moved to San Francisco , where he co-founded the Central Pacific Railroad and was its president from 1861 until his death in 1893. He was also President of the Southern Pacific Railroad from 1868 until his impeachment by Collis Potter Huntington in 1890 . They lived in Sacramento, where Leland Stanford was elected Governor of California in 1861. In 1868 they had a son Leland DeWitt Stanford. In 1871 they expanded their house into a mansion with a park, which is now open to the public as a historical park. Two years later, the Central Pacific Railroad moved their offices from Sacramento to San Francisco and they built a mansion on Nob Hill in San Francisco, which was completed in 1876. In the same year, Leland Stanford bought 650 acres of land near Menlo Park , expanded over the next decade by purchasing neighboring farms, and was successful in breeding and training both trotting and thoroughbred horses. The property, named Palo Alto Stock Farm after a tall redwood tree on San Francisquito Creek , became the future location of Stanford University.

Stanford Memorial Church 2011, which Jane Stanford built in memory of her husband and was dedicated on January 25, 1903 in memory of Leland Stanford

Stanford University

From 1880 to 1881 Jane Stanford accompanied her son on his first tour of Europe, on which he collected many antiques, which she cataloged with him after the trip and helped to exhibit. In 1883 the family made a second tour to Europe, during which Leland Stanford Jr. died in Florence in 1884 after several weeks of illness of typhus. Two months later, upon their return, they visited the presidents of Harvard University , Cornell University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to discuss their plans to start a new university in California. In 1885, Leland and Jane Stanford officially founded Leland Stanford Junior University by signing the founding grant in their San Francisco home. The university has been co-educational and open to all students from the start, regardless of economic status. On May 14, 1887, the foundation stone for the university was laid in today's Building 60 on the occasion of the 19th birthday of Leland Stanford Jr. and on October 1, 1891, Leland Stanford Junior University was opened with a grand opening ceremony. In 1893, Leland Stanford died in Palo Alto and his death resulted in a financial crisis for the university. The situation worsened when the federal government sued the Stanford property for outstanding Central Pacific Railroad debt. Jane Stanford then financed the university from the allowance granted to her and took on an increasingly important role in running the university. In 1896 the United States Supreme Court dismissed the government's claims on Leland Stanford's estate and in December 1898 released his property. In 1897 she traveled to London hoping to sell her personal jewelry collection during Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee , but found no buyers. In 1905, she instructed the university's trustees to sell her jewelry after her death and use the funds as a permanent foundation. The Board of Trustees confirmed this agreement, and the Jewelery Fund continues to expand the university's library holdings. Since 2007, benefactors who provide foundations to purchase libraries have been referred to as members of the Jewel Society. In 1898, when the university's financial difficulties were almost resolved, it embarked on an ambitious building program. She first laid the foundation stone for the Thomas Welton Stanford Library (now Wallenberg Hall), the first building of the Outer Quadrangle, and gained complete control of the university's finances. Although University President David Starr Jordan was charging money for faculty salaries, books, and equipment, she focused her resources on building projects like the Outer Quad, Memorial Church, Memorial Arch, museum expansions, a chemistry building, high school, and library. In 1899 she was concerned that the percentage of women in the student body had risen to 40% and changed the start-up scholarship so that no more than 500 female students could be enrolled at the same time. Although she believed in the importance of education for women, she feared that a large proportion of the women in the student body would discourage men from studying. She believed that an all-women university would not be a suitable memorial for her son. In 1900 she established the first scholarship at Stanford University by using money from an account that had belonged to her son. Her argument with President Jordan over Professor Edward Alsworth Ross , the chairman of the department of sociology, whose anti-Japanese attitude she disagreed with , led to his dismissal. This sparked a controversy over the academic freedom of professors that eventually led to the development of the tenure track system. On June 1, 1903, she passed control of the university to the Board of Trustees and was elected President of the Board of Directors on July 6.

Death from strychnine

In January 1905, Stanford drank from a bottle of mineral water at their San Francisco home and found the water bitter and forced himself to vomit it. She sent the water to a laboratory for a test. The analysis showed that the spring water contained a lethal amount of strychnine . Annoyed at knowing someone had tried to kill her, Stanford went on an extensive trip to Australia, Asia, and the Middle East to gather materials for the museum. On the evening of February 28, 1905, at the Moana Hotel in Honolulu, she asked for soda bicarbonate to calm her stomach. She died of strychnine poisoning that evening. Investigations confirmed Stanford was poisoned by strychnine, but investigators most familiar with the case were reluctant to speculate as to who might have poisoned them.

The cover of the San Francisco Bulletin, March 1, 1905, which reads: "Mrs. Stanford dies, poisoned". The caption reads: "'I have been poisoned! This is a terrible death to die' was Mrs. Stanford's last words."

David Starr Jordan , President of Stanford University, traveled to Hawaii and escorted her body back to California. At a press conference, he said that Jane Stanford had died of heart failure rather than poisoning. The cover-up was apparently successful in that the likelihood that she was murdered was largely overlooked by historians and commentators until the 1980s. Jane Stanford's funeral took place on March 24, 1905 at Stanford Memorial Church, Stanford University. More than 6,000 people attended the service and the mourners followed the coffin down Palm Drive to the Stanford family mausoleum, where Jane was buried between her husband and son. Her will included numerous bequests to charities and relatives, and the university received most of her estate.

Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School in the Palo Alto School District was named after her in 1985. The Californian city of Lathrop in San Joaquin County was built by her husband's railroad company in the late 1860s and named after Jane and her brother Charles Lathrop.

literature

• The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography. II (Reprint ed.). New York, James T. White & Company, 1899.
• Amory, Cleveland: Who Killed Society ?, New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1960.
• Gossel, TA; Bricker, JD: Principles of Clinical Toxicology (Third ed.), CRC Press, 1994, ISBN 978-0781701259 .
• Cutler, Robert WP: The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-8047-4793-6 . OCLC 52159960.
• Romney, Lee: The Alma Mater Mystery, Los Angeles Time, 2012.
• Morris, AD: The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford (PDF). Hawaiian Journal of History, 2004.
• Berner, Bertha: Incidents in the Life of Mrs. Leland Stanford, Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, 1934.

Web links

Commons : Jane Stanford  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Who Killed Jane Stanford?
• biography
• Biography as a timeline
• Jane Stanford: The woman behind Stanford University