USA > Maryland > Men of mark in Maryland biographies of leading men in the state, Volume I > Part 9
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The records of classical scholarship and philology in the United States contain few names, if any, more widely honored than that of Basil L. Gildersleeve.
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DANIEL COIT GILMAN
G ILMAN, DANIEL COIT, educator and first president of Johns Hopkins university, has been the leader in organizing and developing true university work in the United States. His devotion to the cause of higher education, his steady adherence to the ideal rather than the material tendency in our American system of education, and his constant desire to make the scholarship of our country, especially in all departments of higher research, more pro- ductive of intellectual force as well as of scientific knowledge and material progress, make him one of the leading figures in our con- stantly improving university system. It has been justly said of him and of his work: " He believes in individuality, and holds that institu- tions were made for men and not men for institutions. He knows no selfishness nor has he taken part in the tendency to absorb other foundations into a great educational trust; but his faith and services are for the university invisible, not made with hands, which consists in the productive, scientific work of gifted minds, wherever they are, sympathetic by nature and made still more so by the coordination of studies, as one of the most characteristic features of our age."
He was born in Norwich, Connecticut, July 6, 1831. He is a son of William Charles Gilman; and his earliest ancestor in America was Councillor John Gilman, one of the first settlers of Exeter, New Hampshire, who came to this country from Norfolk, England, in 1638. Through his mother, Eliza Coit, he is descended from some of the leading families of eastern Connecticut.
His preparatory studies were pursued in New York city, and he was graduated from Yale college in 1852. He was engaged in post- graduate work in New Haven and Cambridge; for two years he studied in Berlin, attending lectures by Carl Ritter and Adolf Tren- delenburg, after being attached for a short time to the American Legation in St. Petersburg. In 1855 while still in Europe he acted as one of the commissioners to the Exposition Universelle in Paris. He traveled extensively in Europe and gave attention to the social, political and educational condition of the countries he visited and particularly to their physical structure.
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On his return to America, he was appointed librarian of Yale college and was professor of physical and political geography at the Sheffield Scientific school from 1856 to 1872, and did much to develop that institution in its early and formative years. During his resi- dence in New Haven he was made a trustee of the Winchester astro- nomical observatory and a visitor of the Yale school of fine arts. He was superintendent of the New Haven city schools for a time, and was also secretary of the state board of education.
In 1861 he married Mary Ketcham, of New York. She died in 1869. In 1877 Doctor Gilman married a second time, Miss Elizabeth Dwight, daughter of John M. Woolsey of Cleveland and New Haven, and niece of President Woolsey of Yale.
From 1872 to 1875, he was president of the University of Cali- fornia. To the development of this institution he gave great thought and care. Its subsequent growth has been largely due to the plans he formed for it, and to the force and energy with which he set in motion new impulses and ideas in education. Doctor Gilman's attention has always been given more particularly to the interior influences and work of the institutions with which he has been con- nected, than to outside work and financing operations.
On December 30, 1874, he was elected president of the newly- founded Johns Hopkins university. May 1, 1875, he entered on his new duties. When Mr. Hopkins died, in 1873, he bequeathed $7,000,000 (up to that time the largest single gift ever made to educa- tion), to be divided equally between a hospital and the university. After extended inquiries, in their effort to find a man of such breadth of view and force of character as to make successful the first attempt in America to establish an institution to do distinctively post- graduate university work, Doctor Gilman was the choice of the trus- tees for president. A year was spent by him in formulating plans and in visiting men and institutions in Europe. The principles on which the university was founded were that it was to be free from partisan or ecclesiastical influence; its work was to be as special and as advanced as the state of the country would permit; its fame was to rest upon the character of the teachers and scholars and not upon numbers and buildings; it was to begin with a portion of the philo- sophical as distinct from a professional faculty; to emphasize research and to give special attention to literature and the sciences, particu- larly to those which bear on medicine. It has been said that "Balti-
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more was made the brightest educational spot in our country" by the development of the university under Doctor Gilman's guidance. Questions of scholarship broadened into those of statesmanship. A new era opened in educational matters; and to President Gilman must be awarded praise for awakening and stimulating most powerfully the love of the higher learning and of research in our American life. His interest in the men who surrounded him was intense. Their work was watched and encouraged by him; and many of them attribute to his sympathetic suggestions of a career, and to his encourage- ment in it, much of the success of their later life. For years he made "the university the paradise and seminarium of young spe- cialists."
Doctor Gilman's optimism and idealism have been two most prominent factors in his success. He sustained the courage of all in the difficulties which attended the beginning of such a work, and through the depressing years when non-paying investments of funds for a time seriously crippled his plans, he kept alive enthusiasm alike among instructors and students. It is in the brain of such leaders that great educational impulses and inspirations arise; and it is by the will of such men that they are put into practical form for the guidance of succeeding generations. Pure learning, progressive knowledge, practical results, are the standards set before young men in this institution, which has received its impress and power from the mind and services of its first president. Thoroughness and expansion have marked the courses of study in Johns Hopkins university; and no doubt individual supervision of work, and the remarkable oppor- tunities for research so freely offered to young and ambitious aspir- ants, individually, are among the reasons why so many of its graduates are appreciative of the work of the university which gave them a suc- cessful launch in their life-career. Doctor Gilman's twenty-fifth anni- versary in the presidency brought out abounding evidence of the gratitude, appreciation and reverence of the men who had studied under his guidance. To him the whole educational system of the United States is indebted, not only for keeping this leading university free from narrow ideas of competition and rivalry with other institu- tions, but also for a magnificent fight against the materializing tend- encies which are too prevalent in American life. His work has done much to demonstrate that "often the most idcal course is also the most practical."
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Doctor Gilman was a director of the Johns Hopkins hospital; a trustee of the Peabody Institute; the Pratt library, and the Mercan- tile library of Baltimore. He was appointed a trustee of the Peabody F'und for the promotion of education in the South; he is president of the Slater Fund trustees for the education of the Freedmen; president of the American Oriental society; a vice-president of the Archaeological Institute of America. He was also named "officer of public instruc- tion" in France. He was made a member of the Venezuelan Bound- ary Commission, in 1896-97, of the Commission to draft a new Charter for Baltimore, and he has been president of the National Civil Service Association since 1901. The degree of LL.D. was con- ferred on him by Harvard, 1876; Columbia, 1887; St. John's, Balti- more, 1887; Yale, 1889; University of North Carolina, 1SS9; and Princeton, 1896.
Many of his addresses on education and history are collected in a volume, "University Problems in the United States," 189S. He also wrote "The Life of James Monroe," 1898. He edited the miscellaneous writings of Francis Lieber, 1881; and of Doctor Joseph P. Thompson, 1884. His addresses as president of the American Social Science Association; on the opening of Sibley college, Cornell; at the opening of Adelbert college on "The Benefit Society Derives from Universities;" and at Harvard on similar themes, are masterly efforts of a mind temperamentally and by experience fitted to deal with them.
In 1902 he resigned the presidency of the Johns Hopkins univer- sity. In the same year he was selected as the head of the Carnegie Institute, an endowment of $10,000,000, the gift of Andrew Carnegie for the promotion of scientific research in its highest forms. Presi- dent Gilman filled this position for two years, defining the scope, establishing the methods and settling the foundations of the work of the institute. But at the beginning of the second year he informed the trustees that having passed the age of seventy, he had fully determined to resign the presidency at the expiration of his second year. This he did, in December, 1904, the trustees accepting his resignation with professions of deep regret and high esteem.
Doctor Gilman proposes to give these next years to the carrying out of long-cherished plans for literary work.
His address is 614 Park Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland.
HENRY BROOKE GILPIN
G ILPIN, HENRY BROOKE, of Baltimore, wholesale druggist and manufacturing chemist, and trustee in many of the business corporations and charitable institutions and organ- izations of the city, was born at Baltimore on the 3d of April, 1853. His father, Bernard Gilpin, was a wholesale druggist who built up an important business in Baltimore. His mother was Mrs. Mary B. Gilpin. Joseph Gilpin, the earliest known ancestor in America of this family, came from England in 1696, settling on the Brandywine in Delaware. Among his ancestors in England, Bernard Gilpin was known in the reign of Queen Mary as the "Apostle of the North." Among the more recent members of the family, Honorable Henry D. Gilpin, a prominent lawyer, was attorney-general of the United States during President Buchanan's administration. William Gilpin went with General J. C. Fremont on the famous exploring expedition in the then unknown Northwestern territory, and he became the first governor of Colorado.
His boyhood was passed in Baltimore and he attended Friends' elementary and high school. In 1869, in his seventeenth year, he went into business with his father. He has regarded his business as a wholesale druggist and manufacturing chemist somewhat in the light of a profession, and he has contributed actively, by his own effort and by his advice, to the maintenance of high standards in the matter of manufacturing and distributing to the trade drugs, medicines, and chemical supplies. In all the social and philanthropic life of Balti- more, he has taken an active interest.
On the 27th of October, 1SS6, he married Miss Hattie Newcomer. They have had three children, two sons and one daughter, all of whom are living in 1907.
In politics Mr. Gilpin is identified with the Republican party. His favorite forms of amusement are yachting and driving. Mr. Gilpin is president of the Athenaeum Club, commodore of the Baltimore Yacht Club, a member of the Maryland Club, and of the Elkridge Hunt; he is also a member of the Baltimore Club. He is a member of
Sincerely yours HB Siepin
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the Rittenhouse Club of Philadelphia. In New York City he is a mem- ber of the Atlantic and Larchmont Yacht Clubs, and of the Drug Trade Club of New York. The journals of the Drug Trade have contained numerous articles from his pen: and others with reference to his bus- iness and his life; and in the publications which chronicle the inter- ests and events of yachting life, Mr. Gilpin has had prominent men- tion repeatedly.
His address is 1230 St. Paul Street, Baltimore, Md.
ALEXANDER BURTON HAGNER
H AGNER, ALEXANDER BURTON, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, was appointed in 1879 and held the position until June 1, 1903. The bench of this court has been occupied by jurists some of whose dicisions were the only authority on important questions which no other court except the Supreme Court of the United States has juris- diction to decide. Born in the city of Washington, District of Colum- bia, July 13, 1826, he was the youngest but one of eleven children. His father was a trusted public officer for fifty-eight years, having been appointed a clerk during the administration of President Washington. He was a man of "unswerving integrity, marked industry and intelligence and devotion to duty." His mother, Frances Randall Hagner, was a woman of strong intellectual charac- ter and exerted an ennobling influence on her son. Both the paternal and the maternal grandfather of Justice Hagner served in the Revo- lutionary war.
Youthful games, sports and study, filled the years of his boy- hood; and he early developed a taste for gardening and for mechanical work. This last mentioned bent was so strong that he writes: "On the bench I took pleasure in deciding patent office cases, involving nice questions about inventions." :
He was sent to the best schools in Washington and Georgetown, and was graduated from Princeton college in 1845. He read law with his uncle, Alexander Randall, in Annapolis, Maryland, and formed a partnership with him in 1854, which continued until 1876, and after that date the firm name was continued though the partnership was with his cousin, J. Wirt Randall. Mr. Hagner was actively engaged in the duties of his profession in the Court of Appeals, cir- cuit courts of Anne Arundel, Calvert, and other counties, in the courts of Baltimore, and before committees of the state legislature, from April, 1848, until January, 1879. During this time he was employed in numerous important cases involving novel and inter- esting questions, acting at times as judge advocate of courts-
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martial. He was attorney for the Farmer's National Bank of Annapolis, Maryland, of which he was a director. In politics a Whig, as such he was elected to the Maryland legislature in 1854, and during that session served as chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means. In 1857 he was an independent union candidate for congress, but was unsuccessful. In 1860, he was one of the Bell and Everett electors in Maryland. He was commissioned, January 29, 1879, as one of the associate judges of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, to succeed Judge Olin; and he served nearly twenty-five years, the first native of the District who ever occupied a judicial position within its borders.
He is connected with the Protestant Episcopal church. Of his reading, he says, "good historical and biographical works chiefly interest me, with good novels which I enjoy very much. Still I am fond of driving and riding on horseback; walking and hunting; but am not much of a proficient in any games of modern times." "The wishes of my parents accorded with my own as to my choice of a pro- fession, after I recovered from the predilections of my youth; but accident, as is generally the case, had a great deal to do with my impulses. Home, school, early companionship, and contact with men in active life-each of these in almost equal proportion was operative with me, in attaining such measure of success as I can claim to have attained, and whatever failure there has been in my ideals, has been from lack of ambition, and distaste for the methods usually considered essential to political success." He adds, "I should urge young Americans to study and abide by the advice of George Washington in his farewell address; to love their country and reverence such of its men as have followed the precepts of Washing- ton. Absolute truthfulness and sobriety of life will certainly insure success to those who have the ability to perform the duties devolving upon them."
He married in 1854, Louisa, daughter of Randolph Harrison, of Goochland county, Virginia. The degree of LL.D. was conferred upon Justice Hagner by St. John's college, Annapolis, Maryland. He is a member of the Cosmos club, of the American Historical Association, of the National Geographic Society, and of the Sons of the American Revolution; of the Virginia Historical Society; an ex- president and now vice-president of the Washington Alumni Society of Princeton; and for many years president of the South River club
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of Anne Arundel county, Maryland, organized in 1742. He is the senior warden of St. John's Episcopal church, of which his father was one of the founders in 1816. On the thirty-first of March, 1903, he resigned his official position as Justice, to take effect on June 1, following. On the last day of his appearance in court in general term, the members of the bar presented to him, as a testimonial of their regard, an elegant silver vase. A. S. Worthington, Esq., in the presentation address, said: "The men who have been practicing before you here for so many years, asking for and abiding by the judgments which you have rendered, have for you the highest possible regard. They recognize the fact that the ambition with which you entered upon the practice of that profession which you followed so many years at the bar, and have ornamented here so long upon the bench, has been gratified; that in the practice of that profession your life has been a success."
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Clayton Chitall
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CLAYTON COLMAN HALL
H ALL, CLAYTON COLMAN, was born in Baltimore, Mary- land, on the 24th day of August, 1847. He is the son of Thomas William Hall and Elizabeth Stickney (Ward) Hall. His father was a merchant and a prominent Mason; a direc- tor of the Maryland Penitentiary; and one of the organizers of the Merchants Bank of Baltimore.
Mr. Hall's ancestors came to America from Great Britain, either from England, Scotland or Wales, several of them between the years 1636 and 1676. Among the more distinguished of these may be named Samuel Penhallow, Chief Justice of New Hampshire, Hum- phrey Atherton, Major General in Massachusetts, Colonel Joshua Wingate, who served at the siege of Louisburg, and John Cutt, who was President of the New Hampshire Council and ex officio Governor.
Mr. Hall's early life was spent in Baltimore, and his education was chiefly obtained under private tutors and from private reading. In early manhood he was active in fox-hunting, duck-shooting and other outdoor sports.
At the age of fifteen years he began active business life in the counting room of a mercantile house, though his habits were then and continued to be those of a student. He has for nearly forty years been an insurance actuary; and he is also a member of the bar. He became actuary of the Maryland Life Insurance Company in 1868; and this position he resigned in 1901 in order to give his entire attention to private practice as a lawyer and consulting actuary. He is now adviser of numerous corporations, and has been actuary to the State Insurance Department since 1S7S; examiner of trust companies for the Treasurer of Maryland since 1898; and a member of the State Board of Examiners of public accountants since 1900.
It was chiefly through his efforts that in 1893 a commission was appointed by the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore to consider the subject of the construction of a sewerage system; and work upon such a system has recently begun.
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From 1881 to 1883 Mr. Hall pursued advanced courses of study in physics, mathematics and political economy at the Johns Hopkins University; and in 1902 he received from that institution the degree of Master of Arts, causa honoris. He had previously received, in 1897, the degree of Bachelor of Laws from the University of Mary- land.
In addition to other contributions to the history of Maryland, Mr. Hall has published "The Lords Baltimore and the Maryland Palatinate"-an accurate and interesting history of the provincial period of the State, originally delivered in the form of lectures at the Johns Hopkins University in the year 1902.
As a result of his investigation of the subject, the beautiful design of the provincial seal of Maryland was in 1876 restored as the great seal of the State.
- Mr. Hall is a charter member of the Actuarial Society of America, and editor of its "Transactions." For a number of years he was active in the military establishment of the State, serving for three years in the ranks, for three years as Captain in the 5th Regiment, Maryland National Guard, and for five years on the brigade staff as Major and Quartermaster. He is a member of the Maryland His- torical Society and Chairman of its Committee on Publications; of the Society of Sons of the Revolution in Maryland, of which he is Historian; also of the Society of Colonial Wars; of the University Club and of the Merchants Club. In politics Mr. Hall is a Democrat. He is a member of the Protestant Episcopal Church, has been Vestry- man of St. Barnabas Church since 1871, and has been a member of the Diocesan Convention and Chairman of its Committee on Dona- tions. He is also a member of the Churchmen's Club.
Since 1904 Mr. Hall has been lecturer in the Department of Economics in the Johns Hopkins University, his subject being the Theory and Practice of Insurance.
In 1895, on the 29th of June, Mr. Hall married Miss Camilla Ridgely Morris, daughter of the late Thomas Hollingsworth Morris and granddaughter of the late Honorable Reverdy Johnson. They have two children, Clayton Morris Hall and Camilla Elizabeth Pemberton Hall.
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WILLIAM HALL HARRIS
F OR many months preceding President Roosevelt's appoint- ment of Mr. Warfield's successor as postmaster of Baltimore, in December, 1904, speculation had been rife regarding the chances of the several avowed candidates.
Mr. Harris had never been an intense partisan, or the per- sonal devotee of any party leader; and perhaps this was the reason why his candidacy had not been publicly discussed.
In the legal circles, however, from which Mr. Harris was called to assume direction of the Baltimore Post Office, by quiet method and dig. nified practice he had won an enviable reputation as one of the lead- ing lawyers of the city. Instantly the announcement of his appoint- ment was made, the profession, as if with one voice, expressed satisfaction and a belief that the postal affairs of the city would be administered with wisdom and justice. A postal service in Baltimore which has been free of so much as a rumor of partisan bias, and which has met with the entire approval of all commercial interests because of its business-like administration, resulted from the selection of Mr. Harris as postmaster.
William Hall Harris was born in Baltimore, October 12, 1852. His father, James Morrison Harris, was one of the leaders of the Baltimore bar and a member of congress from 1856 to 1862. His mother was, before her marriage, Miss Sidney Calhoun Hall. Among the ancestors of the family in the United States are William Harris, who came to Pennsylvania from Ireland; Joran Kyn, an officer in the body guard of the Swedish governor of Delaware, who came to Dela- ware from Sweden during the first half of the seventeenth century; Christopher Gist, who came to Maryland about 1660; John Hall, an Englishman, who settled in Maryland about the same time; and John Calhoun, who came from Scotland to Maryland before 1730. In the line of John Calhoun was James Calhoun, who served as first mayor of Baltimore; and in the line of John Hall was Josias Carvil Hall, a colonel in the Revolutionary army.
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The childhood days of William Hall Harris were passed in the country, where he occupied much of his time with out-of-door sports. He received his early education at a private school in Baltimore. He also learned much in his home, his parents exerting a strong influence for good on his intellectual, moral, and spiritual life.
When he made his entrance into the business world it was with no set purpose of following a profession. In 1867 he became a clerk in a coffee importing house, and until 1872 he filled various clerical positions, in the latter year becoming a supercargo. From 1872 to 1874 Mr. Harris was a railway manager. He then determined to enter the legal profession, and he read law in his father's office from 1874 to 1876. In the latter year he was admitted to the bar, and has since that time practiced law in Baltimore.
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