Famous Givers and Their Gifts

by Sarah Knowles Bolton

In 1809 he organized the American Fur Company, and established trade in furs with France, England, Germany, and Russia, and engaged in trade with China. He used to say in his old age, "The first hundred thousand dollars—that was hard to get; but afterward it was easy to make more."

He died March 29, 1848, leaving a fortune estimated at $20,000,000, much of it the result of increased values of land, on which he had built houses for rent. By will Mr. Astor conveyed the large sum, at that time, of $400,000 to found a public library; his friends, Washington Irving, Dr. Joseph G. Cogswell, and Fitz-Greene Halleck, the poet, who was his secretary for seventeen years, having advised the gift of a library when he expressed a desire to do something helpful for the city of New York. He also left $50,000 for the benefit of the poor in his native town of Waldorf.

John Jacob Astor's eldest son, and third of his seven children, William B. Astor, left and gave during his lifetime $550,000 to Astor Library. His estate of $45,000,000 was divided between his two sons, John Jacob and William. The son of John Jacob, William Waldorf Astor, a graduate of Columbia College, ex-minister to Italy, is a scholarly man, and the author of several books. The son of William Astor, John Jacob Astor, a graduate of Harvard, lives on Fifth Avenue, New York. He has also written one or more books.

In 1879 John Jacob, the grandson of the first Astor in this country, a graduate of Columbia College, a student of the University of Göttingen, and a graduate of the Harvard Law School, erected a third structure for the library similar to those built by his father and grandfather, and gave in all $850,000 to Astor Library. The entire building now has a frontage of two hundred feet, with a depth of one hundred feet. It is of brown-stone and brick, and is Byzantine in style of architecture. In 1893 its total number of volumes was 245,349.

Astor Library possesses some very rare and valuable books. "Here is one of the very few extant copies of Wyckliffe's translation of the New Testament in manuscript," writes Frederick K. Saunders, the librarian, in the New England Magazine for April, 1890, "so closely resembling black-letter type as almost to deceive even a practised eye. It is enriched with illuminated capitals, and its supposed date is 1390. It is said to have been once the property of Duke Humphrey. There is an Ethiopic manuscript on vellum, the service book of an Abyssinian convent at Jerusalem. There are two richly illuminated Persian manuscripts on vellum which once belonged to the library of the Mogul Emperors of Delhi; also two exquisitely illuminated missals or books of Hours, the gift of the late Mr. J. J. Astor. One of the glories of the collection is the splendid Salisbury Missal, written with wonderful skill, and profusely emblazoned with burnished gold. Here also may be found the second printed Bible, on vellum, folio, 1462, which cost $9,000."

Mrs. Astor gave a valuable collection of autographs of eminent persons; and the family also gave "a magnificent manuscript written with liquid gold, on purple vellum, entitled 'Evangelistarium,' of almost unrivalled beauty, but no less remarkable for its great age, the date being A.D. 870. This is probably the oldest book in America." Ptolemy's Geography is represented by fifteen editions, the earliest printed in 1478.

John Jacob Astor, the grandson of the first John Jacob, died in New York, Feb. 22, 1890. He presented to Trinity Church the reredos and altar, costing $80,000, as a memorial of his father, William B. Astor. Through his wife, who was a Miss Gibbs of South Carolina, he virtually built the New York Cancer Hospital, and gave largely to the Woman's Hospital. He gave $100,000 to St. Luke's Hospital, $50,000 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with his wife's superb collection of laces after her death in 1887. The paintings of John Jacob Astor costing $75,000 were presented to Astor Library by his son, William Waldorf Astor, after his father's death.

MORTIMER FABRICIUS REYNOLDS.

"On the 2d of December, 1814, there was born, in the narrow clearing that skirted the ford of the Genesee River, the first child of white parents to see the light upon that 'Hundred-Acre Tract' which was the primitive site of the present city of Rochester. Mortimer Fabricius Reynolds was the name given, for family reasons, to the first-born of this backwoods settlement." Thus states the "Semi-Centennial History of the City of Rochester, N.Y.," published in 1888.

This boy, grown to manhood and engaged in commerce, was the sole survivor of the six children of his father, Abelard Reynolds. He was proud of the family name; but "his childlessness, and the consciousness that with him the name was to be extinct, had come to weigh with a painful gravity." Abelard Reynolds had made a fortune from the increase in land values, and both he and his son William had interested themselves deeply in the intellectual and moral advance of the community in which they lived.