Henry Villard

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Henry Villard
Born	April 10, 1835 (1835-04-10) Speyer, Rhenish Bavaria
Died	November 12, 1900 (aged 65)

Henry Villard (April 10, 1835 – November 12, 1900) was an American journalist and financier of German origin.

[edit] Early life and education

He was born in Speyer, Palatinate. His baptismal name was Ferdinand Heinrich Gustav Hilgard. His parents moved to Zweibrücken in 1839, and in 1856 his father, Gustav Leonhard Hilgard (who died in 1867), became a justice of the Supreme Court of Bavaria, at Munich. Henry Villard was educated at a Gymnasium (equivalent of "high school") of Zweibrücken, at the French semi-military academy in Phalsbourg in 1849-50, at the Gymnasium of Speyer in 1850-52, and at the universities of Munich and Würzburg in 1852-53. In Munich he had become a member of the student fraternity Corps Franconia. In 1853, having had a disagreement with his father, he emigrated — without his parents' knowledge — to the United States.

[edit] Journalism

It was at this time that he adopted the name Villard. Making his way westward in 1854, he lived in turn at Cincinnati; Belleville, Illinois; Peoria, Illinois and Chicago, did newspaper reporting and various jobs, and in 1856 attempted unsuccessfully to establish a colony of "free soil" Germans in Kansas. In 1856-57 he was editor, and for part of the time was proprietor, of the Racine Volksblatt, in which he advocated the election of John C. Fremont, a (Republican). Thereafter he was associated (in 1857) with the Staats-Zeitung, Frank Leslie's and the Tribune, of New York, and with the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette. He reported on the Lincoln-Douglas debates for the New York papers and was a battlefield correspondent during the Civil War.

At the close of the war he married, January 3, 1866, Helen Frances Garrison, the daughter of the anti-slavery campaigner, William Lloyd Garrison.

Oregon and Transcontinental Company stock owned by Henry Villard

[edit] Transportation

During the Panic of 1873, he acted as agent for holders of Western railroad securities and soon turned to railroad financing as the economy recovered. The Pacific Northwest was the booming sector of American expansion. In Oregon, Villard gained such a strong position in the transportation field that he was able to obtain a controlling interest in the Northern Pacific Railway and became (1881) its president. As the University of Oregon's first benefactor, he had Villard Hall, the second building on campus, named after him.^[1] Building the line across the Northern Rockies temporarily bankrupted him, but, refinanced, he bounced back.^[2]

In New York, he gained control of the New York Post and merged smaller companies to form the Edison General Electric Company, the forebear of General Electric. He was its president until 1893.

[edit] Death

On his passing in 1900, Henry Villard was interred in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York. His autobiography was published posthumously, in 1904.

[edit] Literature

• Memoirs of Henry Villard (three volumes, Boston, 1904)

[edit] See also

• Oswald Garrison Villard

[edit] References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• This article incorporates text from an edition of the New International Encyclopedia that is in the public domain.

1. ^ University of Oregon (2004). Villard Hall. Oregon Photo Tour. Retrieved on 2007-01-22.
2. ^ Henry Villard Is Dead—Capitalist and promoter expires at his country home. New York Times (November 13, 1900). Retrieved on 2008-02-29.

[edit] Further reading

• Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave; John Cullen (2001). Villard: The Life and Times of an American Titan. New York: Doubleday. 

[edit] External links

• Brief biography of Henry Villard
• Helmut Schwab, "Henry Villard": a more detailed biography