A Portrait of Old George Town

by Grace Dunlop Peter

Just about that time, also, Mr. Corcoran began to build another of his beneficent gifts to the city. His beloved daughter had died, and the city and the country was filled with ladies who had been made penniless by the cruel fratricidal war. In 1871 he turned over to the trustees the Louise Home on Massachusetts Avenue, between 15th and 16th Streets, as a home for gentlewomen, the only requirements being enough money to furnish their own clothes and their burial expenses, even lots in Oak Hill were reserved for them after the Louise Home failed to suffice. It was very natural that for a long time its clientele was largely made up of Southerners, as there were very, very many more of them impoverished at that time, and also Mr. Corcoran was himself in sympathy with the Confederates. It is said he saved his house from confiscation by renting it to the French Minister.

Many, very many, were the letters he received thanking him for the help he had sent to widows and orphans of soldiers of the South. He founded homes of that kind in Charleston, South Carolina, and in other places, besides rendering assistance most tactfully in many private cases. Many of these letters are very touching in their gratitude.

His friendship for James Mason, of the Mason and Slidell affair, was close, as was his very real association with General Robert E. Lee, witnessed by letters from General Lee during his life in Lexington, Virginia, after the war, and from Dr. William Pendleton, General Lee's rector there, and from Mrs. Lee in regard to General Lee's death.

He and General Lee spent several summers at the "Old White," as the Greenbriar White Sulphur Springs was then affectionately known. As the years rolled on, Anthony Hyde, a Georgetown man, was kept busy administering the benefactions of his employer. He has told how during a trip through the South after the war, with Mr. Corcoran (he was his secretary), he had difficulty in keeping Mr. Corcoran's gifts within bounds. I was told not long ago by a man in the employ of Oak Hill, how an old street-car conductor had described to him the sight of Mr. Corcoran going to his office, and on the sidewalk in front of it each morning was a line to which he always dispensed "green money," as the old man called it.

The business of his life then was judiciously giving away his money. Here are some of the ways he did it: colleges had always appealed to him, and he was for many years Rector of Columbian University in Washington, now renamed George Washington, and gave freely to it. His name is now borne by one of their largest and best buildings, Corcoran Hall. He gave to the Maryland Agricultural College, to the College of William and Mary in Virginia, loaned money to the Virginia Military Institute and when the bonds came due, tore them up—a little way he had. To Washington and Lee University, also in Lexington, he gave $20,000 besides the library purchased from the widow of Nathaniel Howard, thus, it helped in the getting as well as in the giving.

His portrait hangs in the little chapel in Lexington where lies the body of his friend, Robert Edward Lee. To the University of Virginia he gave $100,000 which endowed two chairs, also giving $5,000 to resuscitate the library which had suffered during the war and the period following, from being unable to procure any new books.

He was one of the first people to subscribe to the fund being raised by certain ladies to purchase Mount Vernon, after the Washington family found themselves unable to keep it up and offered it to the United States Government, which refused to buy and preserve it.

The Episcopal Church of the Ascension on the corner of 12th Street and Massachusetts Avenue was built almost entirely with his money. William Pinckney, its rector when it was begun, was very devoted to Mr. Corcoran. He afterwards became Bishop of Maryland. It worried him exceedingly that Mr. Corcoran had never become a confirmed member and communicant of the church. Many are the long and eloquent letters he wrote to him on the subject. Finally, in his old age, the old gentleman did come forward and be confirmed. The friendship between these two seems to have been very sweet. The Bishop was a simple soul, a great lover of flowers and birds. He was always sending gifts of grapes to his wealthy friend, from Bladensburg. He now rests not far from his friend in Oak Hill. The inscription on his stone, which is surmounted by his statue reads thus:

WILLIAM PINCKNEY, D. D., L L. D.
April 17, 1820
July 4, 1883
Guileless and fearless.

All through his life Mr. Corcoran was a very sociable person. He always loved to play whist and in the last years of his life his nephews and nieces and great-nephews and great-nieces used to go often to play with him and pass the long evenings. A friend of mine remembers being taken as a little girl, with her grandmother, to call on him. She was fascinated by the room where he sat, which had medallions of children's heads, set at intervals into the paneling of the walls. She said he told her they were his grandchildren. She loved looking at them and was distressed when told to go out in the garden to play.