Henry Lee Higginson
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Henry Lee Higginson (November 18, 1834 - November 14, 1919) was a noted American businessman and philanthropist, and founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Higginson was born in New York City, the second child of George and Mary (Cabot Lee) Higginson, and a cousin of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. When he was four years old, his family moved to Boston. He graduated from Boston Latin School in 1851, and began studies at Harvard College. However after 6 months his eyes grew too weak to study, and he was sent to Europe. Upon returning to Boston in March 1855, Henry's father secured a position for him at the India Wharf where he worked as the company's clerk and bookkeeper.
He entered the Union Army on May 11, 1861, as second lieutenant of Company D in Colonel George H. Gordon's 2nd Massachusetts Regiment. In the First Battle of Bull Run, his regiment was ordered to hold the nearby town of Harpers Ferry. Higginson was commissioned major in the cavalry on March 26, 1862. On June 17, 1863, the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry engaged the soldiers of General J.E.B. Stuart and General Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry at the Battle of Aldie. During this battle, Higginson crossed sabers with a foe and was knocked out of his saddle with three saber cuts and two pistol wounds. As his wounds slowly healed in Boston, he married Ida Agassiz, daughter of Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, on December 5, 1863.
After the war, he worked as an agent for the Buckeye Oil Company in Ohio, January to July 1865, purchasing equipment and contracting laborers to work in the oil fields. In October 1865, he and friends paid $30,000 for five thousand acres (20 km²) of cotton-farming land in Georgia. These adventures left him more than $10,000 in debt. He subsequently became a partner in the family business of Lee, Higginson and Co on January 1, 1868.
The family business was profitable, and in March 1881, Higginson published his plan for a Boston orchestra that would perform "concerts of a lighter kind of music." This became the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its lighter offspring, the Boston Pops Orchestra, both of which he generously funded for many years. It is fair to say that neither would have existed without Higginson's extraordinary energy and generosity.
On June 5, 1890, Higginson presented Harvard College a gift of 31 acres of land, which he called the Soldier's Field, given in honor of his friends James Savage, Jr., Charles Russell Lowell, Edward Barry Dalton, Stephen George Perkins, James Jackson Lowell, Robert Gould Shaw, all of whom perished in the Civil War.
In 1891, Higginson established the Morristown School for young men in Morristown, New Jersey, declining to be named as the school's founder. (In 1971 it merged with Miss Beard's School to become today's Morristown-Beard School.) In 1899, Higginson contributed $150,000 for the construction of the Harvard Union, a "house of fellowship" for all students of Harvard and Radcliffe, where they could dine, study, meet, and listen to lectures.
He is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
[edit] References
- The Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson, Bliss Perry, The Atlantic Monthly Press, Boston, 1921.
