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Stephen Girard
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Stephen Girard (May 20, 1750 – December 26, 1831) was an American philanthropist and banker. He personally saved the U.S. government from financial collapse during the War of 1812, and became one of the wealthiest men in America. Childless, he devoted much of his fortune to philanthropy, particularly the education and welfare of orphans. His legacy is still felt in his adopted home of Philadelphia.
776, Girard met Mary Lum, a Philadelphia native and nine years his junior.
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Stephen Girard (May 20, 1750 – December 26, 1831) was an American philanthropist and banker. He personally saved the U.S. government from financial collapse during the War of 1812, and became one of the wealthiest men in America. Childless, he devoted much of his fortune to philanthropy, particularly the education and welfare of orphans. His legacy is still felt in his adopted home of Philadelphia.
First marriage
In 1776, Girard met Mary Lum, a Philadelphia native and nine years his junior. They married soon afterwards and Girard purchased a home at 211 Mill Street in Mount Holly, New Jersey. By 1785, Mary had started to succumb to sudden, erratic emotional outbursts. Mental instability and violent rages led to a diagnosis of mental instability that was not curable. Although Girard was at first devastated, by 1787 he took a mistress, Sally Bickham. In August 1790, Girard committed his wife to the Pennsylvania Hospital (today part of the University of Pennsylvania) as an incurable lunatic. After giving her every luxury for comfort, she gave birth to a stillborn child whose sire is not entirely certain. Girard spent the rest of his life with mistresses.
Girard is the villain in the fictional play The Insanity of Mary Girard by Lanie Robertson. In the play, he arranges to have his wife committed to an insane asylum after she cheats on him. There is apparently no historical basis for this supposition.
Yellow fever
In 1793, there was an outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia. Although many other well-to-do citizens chose to leave the city, Girard stayed to care for the sick and dying. He supervised the conversion of a mansion outside the city limits into a hospital. For his efforts, Girard was feted as a hero by the City Hall after the outbreak subsided.
After the charter for the First Bank of the United States expired in 1811, Girard purchased most of its stock as well as the building in Philadelphia and opened his own bank, naming it the “Bank of Stephen Girard,” which was a principal source of government credit during the War of 1812. Towards the end of the war, when the financial credit of the U.S. government was at its lowest, Girard placed nearly all of his resources at the disposal of the government and underwrote up to 95 percent of the war loan issue, which enabled the United States to carry on the war. After the war, he became a large stockholder in and one of the directors of the Second Bank of the United States. Girard's bank became the Girard Trust Company, and later Girard Bank. It merged with Mellon Bank in 1993, and was largely sold to Citizens Bank a decade later. Its monumental headquarters building still stands.
At the time of his death, Girard was regarded as one of the wealthiest men in America and he bequeathed nearly his entire fortune to charitable and municipal institutions of Philadelphia and New Orleans, including an endowment for establishing a boarding school for poor male orphans in Philadelphia, which opened as the Girard College in 1848. Girard's will was contested by family in France, however, but was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark case, Vidal et al. vs Girard's Executors, 43 U.S. 127 (1844). Michael Klepper and Robert Gunther, in their book The Wealthy 100, posit that, with adjustment for inflation, Girard was the fourth-wealthiest American of all time, behind John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Jacob Astor.
Girard Avenue, a major east-west thoroughfare of North Philadelphia and the location of Girard College, is named for him.
The Village in Between
Girard's vision was a key factor in moving the financial center of the United States from Philadelphia to New York, and in moving the number of early government agencies from Philadelphia to Washington DC. He achieved this by not allowing them to return to Philadelphia following the Yellow Fever Epidemic. He saw these undertakings as "of a lower nature". Girard sought to keep the new country's financial business in New York, and the governing affairs in Washington. He sought to keep Philadelphia as "the village in between". In the process, he laid the groundworks for what today would be called outsourcing.
This approach has crystallized Philadelphia as the innovation machine that has fueled the US economy. In the late 1800's the foundations of the US consumer products and pharmaceutical industries were started in Philadelphia. Today's global organizations such as Merck, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Keebler, Best Foods, Nabisco, Lipton, and Proctor and Gamble all have their origins as Philadelphia innovations. Once established these businesses were outsourced to areas that provided cheap labor, at the time New Jersey, Connecticut, and Ohio.
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