Women Donors to Washington University

   The first significant woman donor to the university was Mary Tileston (Mrs. Augustus) Hemenway,  A resident of Boston, she developed a particular interest in Washington University through her contact with William Greenleaf Eliot, president of the University's board of trustees.  In the early 1860s, after the university had expanded to included the Academy (for male students), the polytechnic institute, the Scientific department, the collegiate department, and Mary Institute, all of which had been financed locally by St. Louis businessmen and the Eliot family, the corporation believed that St. Louis sources of cash had been momentarily exhausted.  Eliot traveled to Boston where he had family connections and had earned a doctorate of sacred divinity from Harvard in 1834.  In 1864, hat in hand, he spoke in churches to wealthy Bostonians about the needs of the university as an important, broadly Christian college in the Mississippi Valley, a key institution in a rapidly growing city, and distributed a pamphlet pleading for funds.  Two donors responded: Nathaniel Thayer, who contributed $25,000 for a Nathaniel Thayer Professorship of Mathematics and Applied Mechanics, and Mary (Mrs. Augustus) Tileston Hemenway with $25,000 for the Tileston Professorship of Political Economy. Hemenway's contribution was named for her father, New York banker Thomas Tileston. These two donations enabled the university to continue operating through the Civil War and into the 1870s. ²
   The kinds of donations women made to the university can be categorized in the following way: support for programs and scholarships; financing for building construction or expansion; and funding for endowment drives.  The focus here is on the first two categories.  But it is important to acknowledge the third by noting that, as was the case with Mary Institute financing at the turn of the twentieth century, women's donations ranged from pledges of a few dollars to thousands for endowment funds.  Women contributed to nearly every fund raising campaign conducted by the university, aside from the early drives that were met solely by the trustees.   Women's organizations played critical roles in raising money—the Women's Society, the Women's Club, the Alumnae Association, and various sororities helped develop and support scholarship and lecture programs, provide furnishings for buildings, and create prize competitions.  Quite often donations for programs came at critical times.  Some of them actually opened areas for academic study in the university, such as history and music.  Others provided funds for stabilizing or furthering programs the donors thought particularly important and worthy, such as medicine and social work.   Abigail Eliot's gift of $100,000 in 1891 was contingent on appointing a new chancellor to replace Marshall Snow, acting chancellor since Eliot's husband's death in 1887.  Winfield S. Chaplin was appointed chancellor and Robert S. Brookings came onto the board in the same year. ³
   Many donations, particularly those connected with a campaign, but for the purpose of financing buildings, were substantial.  In fact, four of the seven individual donors who provided building funds for the new Hilltop campus in the early twentieth century were women.  Typically, contributions in any of these areas were a result of a personal connection to the university, through a father, husband, or other relative, or as an alumna.  When women donated funds for buildings, they did not simply provide the money; they often had expectations and stipulations that the chancellor and board president attempted to incorporate into the final products.  Such edifices were a visible and enduring legacy of women's contributions to shaping the university. ⁴
   The following account of women's contributions is not comprehensive, but rather a selection of significant examples of women's giving to the university. 

Mary Tileston Hemenway:
 Hemenway helped rescue the university from severe financial difficulties with her $25,000 donation in 1864 for the Tileston Professorship.  She and Eliot maintained contact through the years.  In 1877, she sent $5,000 to a subscription fund for a new Mary Institute building.  That same year, Eliot, who had been chancellor, as well as president of the board of trustees, since 1871, had been ill and continued to suffer exhaustion.  Hemenway invited him and his wife Abby to visit her home in Hampton, Virginia, for a week's rest and sent him $200 for traveling expenses.  She also kept him informed about various charitable causes in Boston.   Clearly, they were friends, and it was this friendship as well as her respect for Eliot as a minister and educational leader that attracted Hemenway's last donations to the university were in 1882 for a lecture series in American history ($5,000) and in 1885 ($15,000) for a professorship in American history.  She requested that the university appoint historian John Fiske as lecturer; Fiske was titled Professor of American History and expected to spend at least six weeks per year in St. Louis delivering lectures.  Hemenway's gift helped lay the foundation for a history department at the university. ⁵

Mary C. Hitchcock:
 Mary C. Hitchcock was married to trustee and lawyer Henry Hitchcock.  Hitchcock's term on the board lasted for forty years, from 1859-1899, during which time he was also a leading member of the bar in St. Louis.  He was instrumental in pushing to establish the university's law school (called the St. Louis Law School), which opened in 1867, served as its first dean on a part-time basis while he continued to practice law, and successfully argued for improving the school's academic program and organization by appointing a full-time dean and guaranteeing salaries for professors.   By 1897, Mary Hitchcock and her husband had each donated $10,000 to the law school to supplement its endowment and support its program.  This kind of support enabled the law program to continue without draining the university's resources and furthered the dean's efforts to revise the program. ⁶

Jessie Wright Barr:
 Jessie Barr's commitment to women's education was evident in her first small donation ($500) to Mary Institute at the turn of the century to support its move to Lake and Waterman from downtown St. Louis.  But she and her husband William Barr, who established the dry goods store that later became the first of St. Louis's large department stores, Famous Barr, had already contributed $100,000 to the Manual Training School when it was affiliated with the university.  William Barr had also given funds to a number of subscription drives by the university, in 1899 to facilitate the campus's move to the Hilltop and in 1906 to help retire the debt connected to the move.  When she died in New Jersey in 1916, Barr left a $2,000,000 estate, most of which went to her children and grandchildren.  But Jessie Barr also left a major bequest to the university and the first of its kind: $100,000 to support scholarships and fellowships specifically for young women.  One-half was to be devoted to undergraduate scholarships covering tuition "for such worthy girls of merit who shall be selected annually by the chancellor and trustees," and the other $50,000 was for annual graduate fellowships for "six girls of exceptional talent."  In the latter case, tuition was to be paid and any remaining annual interest from the endowment was to be shared among the six recipients. ⁷

Mary Culver:
 One of Board of Trustees President Robert S. Bookings' most critical projects in the 1910s was putting the university medical school on firm footing.  The St. Louis Medical School had only merged with the university in 1906.  By 1909, medical faculty members were disturbed with the school's lax academic standards.  Brookings and Chancellor David F. Houston were anticipating the impending Flexner Report by the Carnegie Foundation on the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT, 1910), which recommended complete revamping of medical schools along the lines of the Johns Hopkins model.  All of these factors provided impetus for change.  Key to such reform, though, was financing.  Brookings was in contact with Abraham Flexner, who moved from the CFAT to the Rockefeller philanthropy's General Education Board (GEB) in 1913.  Brookings, meanwhile, made numerous gifts to the medical program, in an effort to inspire others to do so and to keep the program revision afloat, with buildings, equipment, and faculty.  Between 1910 and 1914, new buildings were erected at the current location on Euclid and Kingshighway.  At the same time, the GEB was providing grants to medical schools to spur changes in medical education.  With Flexner's encouragement, the GEB agreed to provide $1,000,000 to the medical school's endowment if the university could find an additional $500,000.  Mary Culver provided that $500,000 in 1916.  The $1,500,000 enabled the university to place the medical school faculty in surgery on a full-time basis, along with pediatrics and medicine.  Further GEB grants advanced these reforms to all the departments of the medical school.  Culver's gift was critical in securing the initial
GEB grant. ⁸

Betty Bofinger Brown:
 Washington University affiliated with St. Louis's School of Social Economy in 1909.  The school had been founded in 1903 as the School of Philanthropic Work, to train charity workers for investigating needs of the poor and briefly joined with the University of Missouri for three years.  While it was connected with the university between 1909 and 1915, it was one of the most research-productive units and expanded the university's offerings in graduate study by granting Masters degrees.  A large portion of its budget was financed by the Sage Foundation, and when that ended in 1915, the university ended its affiliation.  The idea of social work was revived by wealthy St. Louisans who persuaded Chancellor Herbert Hadley of the need for training people to work in social service agencies in the St. Louis region.  Hadley appointed Frank J. Bruno to head a social work department within the School of Business and Public Administration.  Bruno, understanding the fragility of the university's commitment to social work education, first gained approval for granting a B.S. in social work in 1927, and then for an advisory board to help support the program.  When he discovered that the estate of George Warren Brown (of Brown Shoe Company) was not yet assigned, he approached Brown's widow, Betty Bofinger Brown.  Brown and her husband had been active in various charitable activities.  Bruno invited her to join the advisory committee and persuaded her to donate $220,000 of the $600,000 remaining in the estate to finance a building for social work education as well as other social sciences.  An additional $100,000 was put into an endowment to maintain and improve the building. 
 Brown had definite ideas about what the building should offer, including an auditorium the university could use for meetings, a common room for social work students and faculty, furnished in part from her home, and classrooms and offices for faculty.   She also requested that the building be named for her husband.  Before she died in 1931, Brown bequeathed an additional $300,000 to endow the academic program in social work.  The building was finished in 1937.  All of her wishes were met in the George Warren Brown School of Social Work. ⁹
 

Avis Blewett:
 Avis Blewett realized that one way to inspire the university's interest in a music program would be to provide financing for a professorship in music.  In 1945, she offered an initial gift of $150,000, or $200,000 "if that seems necessary" and promised to establish a bequest in her will for a permanent endowment of the professorship and extra funds "to be used toward the erection of a building" or part of a larger building for music.  She stipulated that music credits be accepted "as a part of the curriculum leading to the A.B. degree" and that those credits be based on courses in "musical history, theory, appreciation," and that students possess knowledge of "at least elementary musical notation" upon entering the program.  Blewett was the sister of Benjamin Blewett, one of St. Louis's memorable public school superintendents.  Eugene Taverner, professor of classics and a close friend of Blewett, had helped her work out the particulars of her gift.  Because the university had not had a music program prior to her donation, it was a critical catalyst for expanding the humanities and the performing arts at the university. The gift was lauded as a benefit to the city of St. Louis because it put the university in a position, for the first time, to contribute to " the development of a musical culture in" the community. ¹⁰
 

Susan Stiritz and William Stiritz:
 Susan Stiritz, married to trustee William Stiritz, had raised a family and worked as a public administrator before enrolling in Washington University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to complete a Ph.D. in English.   During her course of study,  she took courses in  the Women Studies Program.  The program had been one of the first established (1972), but remained small throughout the 1970s and 1980s.  It had one full-time tenured faculty member until the early 1990s (Joyce Trebilcott in Philosophy and one of the program's founders), a number of adjuncts, and faculty from other departments who offered courses when they could.  In the 1990s, though, the program was reorganized under Coordinator and Lecturer in English Helen Power, whose teaching and administration impressed Stiritz, and from whom Stiritz learned about the needs of the program.  In conversation with Power, she decided to offer the university funds to endow a chair in women's studies. She provided $1,000,000 for the chair, and her husband followed this with a challenge grant of $500,000, pending a university commitment to raise an additional $500,000 for the program to finance conferences, visiting speakers, scholarships, curricular and other materials, and research.  As a result of the endowment, Linda Nicholson was appointed the first Stiritz Chair (as well as Director) in Women and Gender Studies, and the program expanded with faculty appointments shared with other departments, visiting lectures, a whole range of scholarly and program activities, and an expanded library fund that had been created with an additional anonymous gift of $500,000.¹¹

Eliza McMillan:
 In addition to various smaller donations to programs, such as the Art Department Fund and Mary Institute building funds, Eliza McMillan focused her giving on university women and the medical school.  When the university was planning buildings for the Hilltop campus at the turn of the twentieth century, board President Robert S. Brookings thought that a women's dormitory should not be a high priority.  But, although Chancellor Winfield S. Chaplin agreed that the university had other pressing needs, he noted that they would be foolish to turn down a donation for such a building if it were offered.  Eliza McMillan made such an offer and then increased it, when she saw the enlarged plans for the building, to a total of $300,000.  The plan included sleeping rooms, quarters for the dean of women, a dining room, a reception room, and a gymnasium.  She requested that the building be a memorial to her husband William, who had co-founded the American Car and Foundry Company.  McMillan Hall was the first visible and substantial acknowledgement by the university of women's presence on the new campus. 
 McMillan did not stop with McMillan Hall.   She also bequeathed funds for an eye, ear, nose, and throat hospital for the medical school, also to be named for her husband.  In 1925 the funds from the bequest became available and by 1929, the gift was valued at $1,200,000.  For a number of years it was the tallest building in the growing medical school complex. ¹²
 

Eliza Eads How:
 Eliza How had longstanding family roots in the St. Louis area.  Her father James Buchanan Eads had made his fortune as an inventor of the diving bell, builder of gunboats during the Civil War, and designer and builder of the Eads Bridge across the Mississippi between Illinois and Missouri.  Her father-in-law was John How, one of the university's original trustees and a major benefactor to the university.  She wanted a fitting memorial to her father's interests and offered $100,000 to finance a building on campus.  Chancellor Chaplin and President Brookings discussed a number of possibilities, including a library, dormitory, and commons, or endowing a number of professorships, but in the end thought a physics building would be the most appropriate memorial to Eads and an important addition to the new campus.   How agreed and wished the building to be named Eads Hall. ¹³
 

Christine B. Graham:
 Among the new buildings to be erected on the Hilltop campus, but not yet financed in 1903, when the first quadrangle was being erected, was the chapel.  Christine Graham was one of Brookings's St. Louis neighbors, as well as a friend.  Brookings was involved in managing her estate, which came to her upon her husband's death in 1904.  Graham wanted to contribute to a new building for the university in memory of her husband.  Brookings suggested the chapel as an appropriate memorial.  Although Graham was anxious to offer the gift, Brookings persuaded her to wait almost a year to allow her husband's estate to increase in value.  The donation amounted to $100,000, and Graham  Memorial Chapel was named for, Benjamin Brown Graham, of Graham Paper Company, who  had been director of Merchants National Bank and the St. Louis Urban Trust Company. ¹⁵
 

Elizabeth Liggett:
 A men's dormitory was one priority of the trustees and chancellor for the new Hilltop campus.  President Robert Brookings approached a number of donors to raise money for each of the projected buildings.  He was able to persuade Eliza Liggett (widow of John E. Liggett of the Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company), to provide $100,000 for a dormitory in memory of her husband.  Liggett Hall was one of the first building erected on the new campus. ¹⁶
 

Isabel Valle January:
 Washington University's law school students and faculty had spent years in cramped and otherwise inadequate facilities.  The law school had shared quarters with other university departments in the nineteenth century, briefly had its own building downtown when the campus moved to the Hilltop, and then took up space in Ridgely Library, which was intended as a temporary accommodation, but lasted nearly fifteen years.  Robert Brookings was anxious to raise the funds for a separate building for the law school, but had had no luck until the 1920s.   Isabel Valle January was born in St. Louis; her mother Grace was a close friend of Robert Brookings.  After she was widowed, Grace Valle January and her daughter relocated to Italy and lived there until Grace died in 1919, leaving the unmarried Isabel with a large estate ($2,300,000) .  Isabel returned often to St. Louis, where her trust was managed by the St. Louis Union Trust Company and frequently saw Brookings in New York.  She was well aware of the needs of the university and also wished to memorialize her mother.  In 1920, she offered to finance a law school building up to $300,000 of the cost, entirely on the net income from the trust her mother had left her.  Grace Valle January Hall was completed in 1923 and the law school moved in immediately.  Isabel January and Robert Brookings married in 1927.¹⁷
 

Sarah Glascow Wilson:
 Sarah Louisa Glascow Wilson and her husband Newton R. Wilson had personal connections to the university.  Sarah was an alumna of Mary Institute.  Her father was an original trustee of the university.  Newton Wilson was a mining and engineering graduate of the university and made his living as a mining engineer.  When he died in 1914, Sarah returned to St. Louis.  There, she frequently attended university functions and maintained a strong loyalty to the university.  She contributed $560,000 to Mary Institute for the land that became its final home on Warson and Ladue Roads and for some of the buildings erected on the new campus.  She also donated a considerable amount of money to Washington University and, in doing so, she had an uncanny ability to discern important needs of students and faculty.
 She suggested that the university work up plans for a swimming pool for the Hilltop campus.  After seeing the plans, she agreed to provide the $80,000 to pay for it, to further "the health and pleasure of the students," stipulating that it be completed by the beginning of the fall, 1921, term.  When she was informed about delays in building because the bids were higher than expected, she offered another $20,000 to enable the construction to "start immediately."  The following year, she pledged $250,000 for the construction of a new geology building, which reflected her husband's interest in mining.  She did not specify any particulars, except that it was to bear her husband's name.  Wilson Memorial Hall was completed in 1924.¹⁸
 Because she spent time at the university, attending football games and talking with students, she noticed the women students selling hot dogs at the games in the fall of 1925, and asked them why they were doing this.  They told her that they had to raise the final $25,000 to complete the $150,000 they had pledged to qualify for the original $100,000 donated by Mrs. Alice Smith for the erection of the planned Women's  Building.  The Women's Building was important to women students; they had outgrown the one other building the university had allotted specifically to them, McMillan Hall.  They needed meeting rooms for sororities and other clubs and organizations, a reception room to meet with women across campus and with local alumnae, and  a gathering place for commuting students so that they, too, could feel part of the campus.  Sarah Wilson agreed that it was an important cause and contributed the remaining $25,000 for the building.  When she died, Sarah Wilson left the university $500,000 for an endowment to increase faculty salaries in the colleges of liberal arts and engineering. ¹⁹
 

Catherine M. Gaylord:
 The music department had been established with gifts from Avis Blewett, which included endowment for a professorship and a bequest that was used to purchase and convert a house that was named Blewett Hall.  Catherine Gaylord also had a strong interest in music and a commitment to the university, in part as a result of her husband's tenure as a trustee (1941-1952).  Clifford Gaylord had been president of Gaylord Container Corporation, and in 1959 after he died, Catherine Gaylord provided $250,000 for a building and music library near Blewett Hall.  Together, Gaylord and Blewett ensured the music department's place in the College of Arts and Sciences and, in that way, added immeasurably to the university's creative and performing arts.  

1 Washington University Treasurer's Report (WUTR), 1903, 21-24, Washington University Archives (WUA).
2 William G. Eliot to Seth Ranlett, n.d. (ca. 31 May 1864), Treasurer's Office, Papers of Seth Ranlett, box 2, on the funds and about $7,000 from various sources.  Minutes of the Meetings of the Washington University Board of Directors (Board Minutes), 17 June 1864.  William G. Eliot, Washington University Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Address, March 8, 1882, 23, on the significance of Hemenway's gifts, WUA,. See also Marshall Snow, "History of Washington University," and Alexander S. Langsdorff, "History of Washington University, 1853-1953," 184, all in WUA.
3 Ralph E. Morrow, Washington University in St. Louis: A History (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1996), 140, on Abigail Eliot.
4 These are evident in the WUTR (1909, 1929 in WUA., Morrow, Washington University, on the university's early years; 167 on these women;  Morrow devotes surprisingly little attention to women's contributions to any aspect of the university's history, development, and contributions.  See also Names that Live: An Account of the People for Whom the Buildings at Washington University Are Named and of Benefactors Who Gave Them (St. Louis: Washington University, n.d.).
5 William G. Eliot Notebook 10, series 1, box 2, and Eliot to Dear Children, 27 July 1865, series 2, box 1, William G. Eliot Papers (WGE); Minutes of the Meetings of the Washington University Board of Directors (Trustee Minutes), 10 December 1884; all in  Washington University Archives, WUA); Alexander Langsdorff, "History of Washington University, 1853-1953," (typscript), 237, WUA.
6 Morrow, Washington University, 42, 54-55; WUTR, 1897, 18.
7 Robert S. Brookings, nd (ca. May 1917), series 2 box 1, Chancellors Files, Frederic A. Hall (CF, Hall), WUA; "$100,000 Willed to Washington U. by Mrs. Barr," news article, Necrology Scrapbook Vol. C, 19, Missouri Historical Society.
8 Robert S. Brookings Memoir of 1932, Robert S. Brookings Papers;  Press Release, 10 November 1916, CF, Hall; both in WUA.  Morrow, Washington University, 203-27.
9 George Throop to Mrs. George Warren Brown, 21 December 1929, series 2, box 1, CF, Throop; Walter E. McCourt to Frank Bruno, 10 August 1934, Throop to Brown, 19 August 1933, series 6, box 1, CF, Throop; Frank Bruno to Sidney Maestre, 30 August 1935, series 7, box 1; all in CF, Throop, WUA.  See also Morrow, Washington University, 191-92, 254-55, 318.  The department of social work became the George Warren Brown School of Social Work in 1945.
10 Eugene Taverner to Arthur Holly Compton, 8 November 1945; Charles H. Stix to Blewett, 13 January 1946; and Taverner to Compton, 28 September 1945, series 1, box 1, CF, Compton, WUA.
11 Barbara Rea, "Stiritzs Gift Endows Professorship, Stresses Value of Feminist Thought," Washington University Record (July 16, 1998); "Nicholson in First Stiritz Professor," Wasshington University Record (March 23, 2000).
12 Brookings to Chaplin, 6 July 1091 and Chaplin to Brookings, 9 July 1901, box 1, CF-Chaplin; Board Minutes, 2 February 1906; Robert S. Brookings to Mrs. William McMillan, 3 February 1906, box 3, CF, Chaplin; see also Matt MacDonald, "The Development of Women's Campus Culture at Washington University, 1853-1945," (senior honors thesis in history, Washington University, 1994), 27-32; all in WUA.
13 Morrow, Washington University, 343-44.
14 Chaplin to Brookings, 13 March 1901, Brookings to Chaplin, n.d. (ca. July 1901), Chaplin to Brookings, 8 July 1901, 4 September 1901, box 1; How to Chaplin, 17 June 1903, 21 June 1903, box 2; all on CF, Chaplin, WUA.  See also Names that Live, 14.
15 Robert S. Brookings Memoir of 1932, Robert S. Brookings Papers; WUTR, 1908, and Names that Live, 42, all in WUA.
16 Elizabeth Liggett to Gentlemen, Board Minutes, 15  June 1899;  WUA; Names that Live, 16.
17 Board Minutes, 14 October 1920, WUA; Names that Live, 8.
18 Sarah Glascow Wilson to F. A. Hall, 9 May 1921, Board Minutes, 24 May 1921; George R. Throop to Brookings, 25 July 1921, series 4, box 1, CF, Hall; Hall to Brookings, 13 December 1922, series 5, box 1, CF, Hall; Wilson to Herbert S. Hadley, 20 February 1925, series 1, box 4, CF, Hadley; all in WUA. Names that Live, 20-21.  The last source gives different figures ($125,000 for the pool and $250,000 for Wilson Hall) from the ones I found in the Chancellors Papers and Board Minutes; she pledged $250,000 for Wilson Hall, but sent in the last of $275,000 for the Hall in 1925; she pledged $80,000 for the swimming pool and then added another $20,000.  It may be that costs were higher and she agreed to cover them.
19 Langsdorff, "History of Washington University," 264; Names that Live, 20-21.