Henry Villard

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Henry Villard : biography

April 10, 1835 – November 12, 1900

Philanthropy

In 1883 he paid the debt of the University of Oregon, and gave the institution $50,000. As the University of Oregon’s first benefactor, he had Villard Hall, the second building on campus, named after him. He liberally aided the University of Washington Territory. He also aided Harvard University, Columbia University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History.

In Speyer he was a main benefactor for the construction of the Memorial Church and a new hospital. There he is still known as Heinrich Hilgard, and a street is named after him (Hilgardstrasse). He has been honoured with the freedom of the city, and there is a bust of him on the compound of the Speyer Diakonissen Hospital.

In Zweibrücken he built an orphanage in 1891. He has also financed a school for nurses. He devoted large sums to the Industrial Art School of Rhenish Bavaria, and to the foundation of fifteen scholarships for the youth of that province.

He supported Bandelier in his research on South American history and archaeology.

Journalism

On emigrating to America, he adopted the name Villard, the surname of a French schoolmate at Phalsbourg, to conceal his identity from anyone intent on making him return to Germany. Making his way westward in 1854, he lived in turn at Cincinnati; Belleville, Illinois and Peoria, Illinois where he studied law for a time; and Chicago where he wrote for newspapers. Along with newspaper reporting and various jobs, in 1856 he attempted unsuccessfully to establish a colony of "free soil" Germans in Kansas. In 1856-57 he was editor, and for part of the time was proprietor of the Racine Volksblatt, in which he advocated the election of presidential candidate John C. Frémont of the newly-founded Republican Party.

Henry Villard in 1866 Thereafter he was associated with the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, for whom he covered the Lincoln-Douglas debates; Frank Leslie’s; the New York Tribune; and with the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette. In 1859, as correspondent of the Commercial, he visited the newly discovered gold region of Colorado. On his return in 1860, he published The Pike’s Peak Gold Regions. He also sent statistics to the New York Herald that were intended to influence the location of a Pacific railroad route. He followed Lincoln throughout the 1860 presidential campaign, and was on the presidential train to Washington in 1861. He was correspondent of the New York Herald in 1861.

During the Civil War, he was correspondent for the New York Tribune (with the Army of the Potomac, 1862–63) and was at the front as the representative of a news agency established by him in that year at Washington (1864). Out of his experiences reporting the Civil War, he became a confirmed pacifist. In 1865, when Horace White became managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, Villard became its Washington correspondent. In 1866, he was the correspondent of that paper in the Prusso-Austrian War. He stayed on in Europe in 1867 to report on the Paris Exposition.

At the close of the Civil War, he married Helen Frances Garrison, the daughter of the anti-slavery campaigner William Lloyd Garrison, on January 3, 1866. He returned to the United States from his correspondent duties in Europe in June 1868, and shortly afterward was elected secretary of the American Social Science Association, to which he devoted his labors until 1870, when he went to Germany for his health.