Famous Givers and Their Gifts

by Sarah Knowles Bolton

Mr. Stanford was buried at Palo Alto, Saturday, June 24. The body lay in the library of his home, in a black cloth-covered casket, with these words on the silver plate:—

LELAND STANFORD.
BORN TO MORTALITY MARCH 9, 1824.
PASSED TO IMMORTALITY, JUNE 21, 1893.
AGED 69 YRS., 3 MOS., 12 DAYS.

Flowers filled every part of the library. The Union League Club sent a floral piece representing the Stars and Stripes worked in red and white in "everlasting," with star lilies on a ground of violets. There was a triple arch of white and pink flowers representing the central arch of the main University building. There were wreaths and crosses and a broken wheel of carnations, hollyhocks, violets, white peas, and ferns.

At half-past one, after all the employees had taken their last look of the man who had always been their friend,—one, seventy-six years old, who had worked with Mr. Stanford in the mine, broke down completely,—the body was borne to the quadrangle of the University by eight of the oldest engineers in point of service on the Southern Pacific Railroad. The funeral cortège passed through a double line of the two hundred or more employees at Palo Alto, several Chinese laborers being at the end of the line. Senator Stanford was always opposed to any legislation against the Chinese.

The body was placed on a platform at one end of the quadrangle, the remaining space being filled with several thousand persons. About sixteen hundred chairs were provided, but these could accommodate only a small portion of those present. The platform was decorated with ferns, smilax, white sweet peas, and thousands of St. Joseph's lilies. The temporary chancel was flanked by two remarkable flower pieces: on the left, a fac-simile of the first locomotive ever purchased and operated on the Central Pacific Railroad, the "Governor Stanford," sent by the employees of the company. The boiler and smoke-stack were of mauve-colored sweet peas; the headlight and bell were of yellow pansies; the cab of white sweet peas bordered by yellow pansies; the tender of white sweet peas edged by pansies and lined with ivy; on the side of the cab, in heliotrope, the name Governor Stanford. On the right of the bier was the gift of the employees of the Palo Alto stock-farm, a representation in sweet peas of the senator's favorite bay horse.

After the burial service of the Episcopal Church, a solo, "O sweet and blessed country," and address by Dr. Horatio Stebbins of the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco, the choir sang "Lead Kindly Light," and the body of Senator Stanford was conveyed through the cypress avenue to the mausoleum in the ten acres adjoining the residence grounds. The tomb is in the form of a Greek temple lined with white marble, guarded by a sphinx on either side of the entrance.

Here beside the open doors stood another beautiful floral tribute, a shield eight feet high, of roses, lilies, and other flowers sent by the employees of the Sacramento Railroad shops. Worked in violets were the words "The Laborers' Tribute to the Laborers' Friend." The choir sang, "Abide with Me," the body was laid in the tomb, and the bronze doors were closed. A few days later the body of Leland Stanford, Junior, the boy whose death, as Dr. Stebbins said at the senator's funeral, "drew the sunbeams out of the day," was laid beside that of his father. Some time the mother will sleep here with her precious dead.

Mr. Stanford's heart was bound up in his University. He said, after his son died, "The children of California shall be our children." Mr. Sibley of Pennsylvania tells how, three years after Leland Junior died, he and Mr. Stanford "went together to the tomb of the boy, and the father told amid tears and sobs how, since the death of his son, he had adopted and taken to his heart and love every friendless boy and girl in all the land, and that, so far as his means afforded, they should go to make the path of every such an one smoother and brighter."

Mr. Stanford told Dr. Stebbins, in speaking of the University: "We feel [he always used the plural, thus including that womanly heart from whose fountains his life had ever been refreshed] that we have good ground for hope. We are very happy in our work. We do not feel that we are making great sacrifices. We feel that we are working with and for the Almighty Providence."