GEORGE PEABODY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 May 1941, Page 7

GEORGE PEABODY

HANDSOME GIFTS TO POOR. He was loved and respected on both sides of the Atlantic, and it will be long before the good he did is forgotten. It lives still. Born in Danvers, in Massachusetts, in 1795, he died in 1869. He was George Peabody, and he began working life ns a grocer's boy, for his people were poor —and he never forgot it. J It was a year before Waterloo that the beginning of his fortune was made. With Elisha Riggs, who found the money, he opened a wholesale dry goods warehouse at Georgetown, opening branches in New York and Baltimore and other cities soon after. Business went on amazingly, and both Peabody and Riggs made money. Mr Riggs retired, leaving' George Peabody as» senior partner, and from that time on I money flowed to this .American citizen! as water to the Mississippi. I Eut it is not how he made his wealth so much as how he disposed of it that is interesting. He was only a young! man when he heard one day in London that Maryland was in low water. He immediately negotiated a State loan of £1,600,000, and would never afterwards receive it back. He was always doing good with, his money, but the poor were uppermost in his thoughts. He gave £50,000 to an education?.! trust ini his own town. He founded the Peabody Institute at Baltimore —giving £60.000. and afterwards increasing it to £209,000. He gave Harvard University £30,000. He helped on Negro education with a gift of £420,000, and afterwards in- J creased his gift to £700.000. He gave! London £150.000 for the benefit of the* poor, and added to it in later years till! it totalled half a million—the foundation of the Peabody Dwellings trust. He accepted lew honours. Queen Victoria wanted to make him a baronet, but he refused the title; and when he died (in England, lying for a month mi Westminster Abbey) he was buried in! his own town in America —where he} had run errands as a grocer’s lad.