Historical records matching Matthew Vassar
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About Matthew Vassar
Matthew Vassar
Founder of Vassar College
Find A Grave Memorial ID # 7872461
Matthew Vassar, who at age sixty-nine, with no previous experience as an educator, endowed and founded a private college for women. It was the most unexpected and controversial accomplishment of a feisty Poughkeepsie business and civic leader’s career. In 1861, public education was not mandatory in the United States. There were very few high schools for either sex, and almost no real colleges for women. Yet that year Vassar, with no more formal education behind him than a meager two or three years of grammar school, out of the intellectual blue founded Vassar Female College, where women might experience the same serious educational challenge as their brothers who went to Yale, Harvard, or Brown. Once he had decided to use much of his large, self-made fortune to achieve this end, he worked without stopping. His contributions to the education of American women constitute a unique achievement with national and international implications.
Vassar was a complex man who until late in life had many civic, cultural, and economic irons in the fire, but the education of women was not one of them. “Progress is my motto,” he wrote in a speech prepared for his college trustees shortly before he died, and that phrase is an indication of the open attitudes and plainspeaking that characterized his activities on many fronts. He was a practical man who had a compulsion to create something of lasting value for the human race that would endure after his death. He struggled for a few years to decide what that something should be, weighing one possibility against another and listening to the conflicting advice of the many acquaintances and friends who were eager to help him spend his money.
Matthew Vassar emigrated from England in 1796 at the age of four with his parents, Ann and James Vassar, his four siblings, and some relatives. His family had lived near Norwich in East Anglia, England, where he was born on April 29th, 1792. Like other immigrants in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Vassar’s parents came to America with the idea of striking out anew. “They were the first of the Family name that left their Fatherland and were induced to seek this new Western continent more for the love of civil and religious freedom than from any pecuniary consideration,” wrote Matthew Vassar in an unpublished manuscript. In England the Vassars were members of the independent church, and they earned their modest livelihood in farming, brewing ale, and brickmaking.
Not too many months after they arrived in the United States, the family group put down stakes in Dutchess County, on Wappinger’s Creek, a few miles from the Hudson River. Not until Matthew’s uncle, Thomas Vassar, returned to Norfolk a year later to bring back some English barley, however, was the family able to begin its modest brewing enterprise. In 1801 James Vassar sold his farm and settled in the center of Poughkeepsie to brew ale.
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Matthew Vassar's Timeline
| 1792 |
April 29, 1792
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Dereham, Norfolk, England, United Kingdom
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| 1868 |
June 23, 1868
Age 76
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Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County, New York, United States
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| ???? |
Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery, 342 South Avenue, Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County, New York, 12601, United States
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