College for Orphans

To many of his contemporaries in early 19th Century Philadelphia, Stephen Girard was an old codger in an unfashionable full-skirted coat and pigtail who frequently jostled his way to High Street Market to sell baskets of eggs and vegetables from his farm in Passyunk Township, three miles southwest of the city. Solid burghers, however, recognized him as the man who paid one-tenth of Philadelphia's real estate taxes, who had in 1814 subscribed to 95% of the U. S. Government's unpopular $5,000,000 war loan. Clergymen were painfully aware that he read the French rationalists, owned 18 ships bearing such names as Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Helvetius. One morning in 1830, when he was 80 and half blind, he came in from the country with his eggs, was knocked down by a wagon. Year later he died.

Most of Philadelphia went to his big funeral. Most of the U. S. heard about his will. In it eccentric Stephen Girard, whose only child died in infancy, set aside some $6,000,000, the bulk of his fortune, for a college for "poor male white orphan children," prescribed that "no ecclesiastic, missionary, or minister of any sect whatsoever, shall ever hold or exercise any station or duty whatever in the said College; nor shall any such person ever be admitted for any purpose, or as a visitor." When Stephen Girard's French kin tried to break the will, their advocate, Daniel Webster, carried the plea to the U. S. Supreme Court, where he eloquently protested against "a cruel experiment upon these orphans to shut them up and make them the victims of a philosophical speculation. ... If the courts should set this will aside ... it would be the crowning mercy of my professional life!" Unimpressed, the Court unanimously upheld the whim of the late Stephen Girard.

Meanwhile masons had been busy with the first College building, a vast Greek temple of gleaming white marble for which the Founder had left precise specifications. In 1848 Girard opened its first class of 100 fatherless boys. Within the building, which a hostile press called "The Icy Ghost of Two Million Dollars," a hardboiled staff shaved the orphans' heads, scrubbed their necks, put them through a cheerless routine of study and frequent canings.

When Philadelphia burgeoned into a metropolis, Girard's endowment, shrewdly invested in downtown real estate and Schuylkill County coal leases, rocketed. The 104-year-old Girard endowment now totals $88,844,000. Only Harvard and Yale are richer than this charity elementary and high school. Sprouted from its wealth are 28 more white marble buildings, within which 1,700 orphans, a staff of 600, live a life more generous than the Founder ever knew. From a long waiting list the College annually selects 150 boys, indentures them until they are 18. Moppets as young as 6 are admitted. They live in dormitory groups of 25-to-35, obey a governess who sees that they take a shower every night, change their linen every second morning. As they grow older they branch out into larger sections under masters, live in regular boarding-school dormitories, enjoy open fireplaces, comfortable furniture, phonographs, radios. Except for Pennsylvania's late Governor Martin Brumbaugh, who came on invitation, no ordained clergyman has yet been welcomed within the gates of Girard. Many a clergyman, however, would be gratified at the intensely religious atmosphere that has grown up inside in spite of the free-thinking Founder's will. First book to be studied is the Bible. The orphans learn to say grace before meals, to file every morning for non-sectarian prayer into the $1,600,000 College chapel where the Scripture is intoned from a "reading desk."

Longtime President Cheesman Abiah Herrick went to Girard in 1910 with the gospel of progressive education, liberalized the rich orphanage along its present lines. Nowadays, when Girard boys graduate, most have learned a trade, go straight to work. And some go to the top of their professions; e. g., President William H. Kingsley of Penn Mutual Life Insurance Co., President John Albert Brown of Socony-Vacuum Oil Co., famed Landscape Architect John Nolen.

This year Girard's able President Herrick reaches 70. Last week Girard named as his successor Dr. Merle Middleton Odgers, Dean of the University of Pennsylvania's College of Liberal Arts for Women. Lank, sharp-faced, 35, Merle Odgers is married, lives with his wife and daughter in suburban Upper Darby. An ardent classicist, he may circumvent one of the last of Founder Girard's barriers: "I do not forbid, but I do not recommend the Greek and Latin languages."

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