George Peabody
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- This article is about George Peabody, a London-based banker and philanthropist from the northern United States, founder of the Peabody Institute and the Peabody Trust. For information about George Peabody, the capitalist and promoter of education in the southern United States, see George Foster Peabody.
George Peabody (February 18, 1795 – November 4, 1869) was an entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded the Peabody Institute. He was born in what was then South Danvers, Massachusetts (now Peabody, Massachusetts), to a family with Puritan antecedents in the state, but that was solidly middle class. His birthplace at 205 Washington Street in Peabody is now the George Peabody House Museum ([1]), a museum dedicated to preserving his life and legacy. One of George Peabody's longtime business associates and friends was the renowned banker and art patron, William Wilson Corcoran.
In 1816, Peabody moved to Baltimore, where he would live for the next 20 years. And in 1837, Peabody settled in London, where he would spend the rest of his life.
George Peabody never married. He died in London on November 4, 1869, aged 74. At the request of the Dean of Westminster and with the approval of the Queen, Peabody was given a temporary burial in Westminster Abbey.
His will provided that he be buried in the town of his birth, Danvers, Massachusetts, and Prime Minister Gladstone arranged for Peabody's remains to be returned to America on HMS Monarch, the newest and largest ship in Her Majesty's Navy. He is buried in Salem, Massachusetts, at Harmony Grove Cemetery.
The town of South Danvers, Massachusetts, changed its name to The City of Peabody, Massachusetts in honor of its favorite son. Peabody is a member of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans located at the Bronx Community College, at the former site of New York University (NYU).
A statue of him stands next to the Royal Exchange in the City of London, unveiled in 1869 shortly before his death. There is a similar statue of him next to the Peabody Institute, in Mount Vernon Park, part of the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland.
[edit] Business
While serving as a volunteer in the War of 1812, Peabody (pronounced PEE-buh-dee) met Elisha Riggs, who, in 1814, provided financial backing for the wholesale dry goods firm of Peabody, Riggs, and Company.
In 1851 he founded George Peabody and Company to meet the increasing demand for securities issued by the American railroads and three years later went into partnership with Junius Spencer Morgan (father of J. P. Morgan) to form Peabody, Morgan and Co., where the two financiers worked together until Peabody’s retirement in 1864. On his retirement, the firm was renamed J. S. Morgan & Co. The former UK merchant bank Morgan Grenfell (now part of Deutsche Bank), international universal bank JPMorgan Chase and investment bank Morgan Stanley can all trace their roots to Peabody's bank. (Chernow: The House of Morgan)
[edit] Philanthropy
Peabody is the acknowledged father of modern philanthropy, having established the practice later followed by Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Bill Gates, and some say Johns Hopkins.
In 1862 in London, Peabody established the Peabody Donation Fund, which continues to this day, as the Peabody Trust, to provide good quality housing "for the deserving poor" in London. The first dwellings opened by the Peabody Trust for the "artisans and labouring poor of London" were opened in Commercial Street, Whitechapel in February 1864. They were designed by the architect H.A. Darbishire in an attractively ornate style, a break from the convention of Gothic that private clients came to require of him.
Peabody was made a Freeman of the City of London, the motion being proposed by Charles Reed in recognition of his financial contribution to London's poor.
In America, Peabody founded and supported numerous institutions in New England and elsewhere. At the close of the American Civil War, he established the Peabody Education Fund to "encourage the intellectual, moral, and industrial education of the destitute children of the Southern States." His grandest beneficence, however, was to Baltimore; the city in which he achieved his earliest success.
George Peabody is known to have provided benefactions of more than $8 million, most of them in his own lifetime. Among the list are included:
- 1852 The Peabody Institute (now the Peabody Institute Library), Peabody, Mass: $217,000
- 1856 The Peabody Institute, Danvers, Mass (now the Peabody Institute Library of Danvers): $100,000
- 1857 The Peabody Institute, Baltimore: $1,400,000
- 1862 The Peabody Donation Fund, London: $2,500,000
- 1866 The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University
- 1866 The Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University: $150,000
- 1867 The Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass: $140,000
- 1867 The Peabody Institute, Georgetown, District of Columbia: $15,000 (today the Peabody Room, Georgetown Branch, DC Public Library).
- 1867 Peabody Education Fund: $2,000,000
[edit] Further reading
- Parker, Franklin (1995). George Peabody: A Biography. Vanderbilt University Press. ISBN 0826512569.
- Hanaford, Phebe Ann (1870). The Life of George Peabody: Containing a Record of Those Princely Acts of Benevolence Which Entitle Him to the Esteem and Gratitude of All Friends of Education and the Destitute, Both in America, the Land of His Birth, and in England, the Place of His Death. B.B. Russell.
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