Brooklyn Institute Presidents, 1823—1887
Brooklyn Institute Presidents
Jesse C. Smith, President, Brooklyn Institute
Jesse C. Smith (1808—88), a lawyer with a Brooklyn practice, served in the Civil War. Smith was active in the state militia, and commanded the 14th Regiment (also called the 14th Brooklyn), a volunteer militia regiment that held its drills in the Apprentices’ Library Building, at Cranberry and Henry Streets, which figured in the “Angel Gabriel” riots. According to Smith’s obituary in The New York Times, “while in command of the regiment, the ‘Angel Gabriel’ riots, caused by the preaching of a ‘crank’ pretending to be the Angel Gabriel in vacant lots in Atlantic-avenue, were suppressed.” Smith served as a brigadier general in the National Guard, commanding the 11th Brigade at the Battle of Gettysburg.
Smith was also active as a public servant. In 1850, Governor Fish appointed Smith surrogate of Kings County and he held this office from 1850—54. In 1862 he was elected to the New York State Senate, where he was appointed head of the committee on military affairs and reorganized the National Guard. In Brooklyn, he served on an 1859 commission to “select ground suitable for the purpose of a great park and parade ground,” which ultimately came to be the current Prospect Park and Parade Grounds.
Smith became president of the Institute in 1879; though John B. Woodward had held the presidency for only one year, he resigned to enable Smith to take the position. While Smith was president, Woodward remained an active player, continuing to serve as secretary and supporting his friend. In 1886, with unpaid debt from the remodeling of the Washington Street building, the directors were considering merging the Institute with the Union for Christian Work. Woodward, as secretary, was instrumental in ensuring the debt was paid avoiding a merger.
William Everdell, President, Brooklyn Institute
1870—78
William Everdell, Jr. (1822—1912) was a printer and Civil War veteran who presided over the Institute while it was struggling to repay the debt incurred by the remodeling of the Washington Street building. Articles in The Brooklyn Eagle credit him with establishing “life memberships” to raise money for the Institute, though the debt remained a burden throughout Everdell’s service.
Professionally, Everdell followed his father into the printing and engraving business on Fulton Street, running his own shop with color printing, eventually merging his shop with his father’s. He served in the National Guard, enlisting in the Brooklyn City Regiment in 1850. In 1962, he was chosen as the first colonel of the New York State National Guard’s 23rd Regiment, and commanded that regiment when it served for a month on the front in the Civil War’s Gettysburg Campaign. During the summer of 1863, the regiment was recalled to New York to suppress draft riots in the city.
Peter G. Taylor, President, Brooklyn Institute
1857-70
Peter Taylor (birth and death dates unknown) was a Brooklyn City alderman, and, in 1852, Whig candidate for mayor. He was a trustee of the First Unitarian Congregational Church of Brooklyn, as was a previous Institute president, Charles Olcott.
When Taylor assumed presidency of the Institute, its programs were popular. However, after several years, popularity declined, and by 1865 the directors felt that physical improvements were needed to update and improve the building. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle headline of July 1, 1865 was frank in its assessment of the board: “Proposed Improvements—Only $10,000 Wanted to Carry Them Out—Can the Money be Raised under the Present Management?” The article elaborated: “Ten thousand dollars is a small sum to raise for a city like Brooklyn, but to obtain it will require an effort which the present Board seems totally incapable of making…They are worthy gentlemen, all, and no doubt were up with their time fifteen years ago. At present one cannot help thinking that they are a long way behind it.”
The Eagle’s pessimism was unwarranted; in 1867 the remodeling project began.
Rollin Sanford, President, Brooklyn Institute
1853—57
Rollin Sanford (birth and death dates unknown) had been active in Brooklyn civic life for decades before becoming president of the Institute. In 1843, he was elected a trustee of the Brooklyn City Library, a subscription library that existed from 1839 to 1851, when the library was relocated to the Lyceum Building. Sanford was also a trustee of the South Brooklyn Savings Institution. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that on September 22, 1852 he was nominated the Whig candidate for Congress. According to the Eagle “Mr. Sanford was, we believe, educated to the bar.” It also described him as a successful merchant, a dealer in “dye woods” in Portchester.
Charles M. Olcott, President, Brooklyn Institute
1852—53
Charles Olcott (? - 1853) served briefly as president of the Institute, and had previously served as treasurer. He was a prominent member of the Brooklyn community and a trustee of Kings County Mutual Insurance Company. In 1833 he founded Olcott and McKesson, a botanical drug and chemical company, which grew to become today’s McKesson Corporation, a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company listed on the 2013 Fortune 500 list as the 14th highest revenue-generating company in the US.
Augustus Graham, President, Apprentices’ Library/Brooklyn Institute
1840-52
Augustus Graham (1776—1851) is credited with reviving the Apprentices’ Library and ushering it into its next fruitful phase as the Brooklyn Institute. Graham had been an enthusiastic founder of the Apprentices’ Library. He revived the institution in 1935 by obtaining space in the Brooklyn Lyceum building and combining the offerings of the two. When the Lyceum failed, Graham purchased the building, and in 1843, the institution was incorporated by an act of the Legislature as the Brooklyn Institute. For the next decades, the Institute became the center of social and intellectual life in Brooklyn, offering courses and lectures by the prominent speakers and thinkers of the day, including Henry Ward Beecher, Samuel Morse, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Graham further solidified the Institute in 1848 by settling the mortgage on the building, and establishing an annual lecture celebrating George Washington. When Graham died in 1851, his will provided an endowment that funded the “Graham Lectures” as well as paintings for the future Brooklyn Museum. For many years, he was listed as benefactor of the Brooklyn Institute, and then of its successor, the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.
Graham came to Brooklyn from Maryland, and derived his wealth from lumber, breweries, and distilleries. In Brooklyn he founded the Brooklyn White Lead Company, a factory for turning white lead into pigment for paint, one of the first to do so. Graham was a generous and charitable philanthropist, supporting arts, education, and social welfare. In addition to his endowments to the Brooklyn Institute, he was a founder of Brooklyn Hospital and First Unitarian Church. He supported the Old Ladies Home (later the Graham Asylum) founded by his “brother,” John Graham, as a home for women where they could enjoy “asylum from adversity and indigence.”
Augustus and John Graham weren’t actually brothers, and “Graham” was not the birth name of either. Speculation about their living arrangements and the “mystery” of their relationship can be found in the pages of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, but as Adrian Stiles wrote in A History of the City of Brooklyn,
Whatever the motives that induced them to practice the peculiar comedy of their Brooklyn life, it is certain that brothers and sisters can rarely be found to agree in more perfect harmony than in their case. The Grahams were exemplary as men of character and probity, while their works do praise them in this as well as in other communities.
Fanning C. Tucker, President, Apprentices’ Library
1832—40
An unpublished manuscript in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum Archives tells us that Fanning Cobham Tucker (1783?—1856)
…bought from Ephraim Holbrook April 28th, 1834 and sold to the Brooklyn Lyceum May 10, 1835 the land on Washington Street upon which the Brooklyn Lyceum was built in 1836. Thus being erected the building was purchased September 30, 1842 by Mr. Augustus Graham (third president of the Apprentices’ Library) for the Apprentices’ Library which in 1843 became the Brooklyn Institute.
Robert Snow, President, Apprentices’ Library Association
1823—32
Robert Snow (?—1833) was a prominent member of Brooklyn civic life and a founder of Brooklyn’s first Sunday school. In 1823, he helped to found the Apprentices’ Library Association, the first free circulating library in Brooklyn, which would evolve into the Brooklyn Institute. The other officers and directors were also important members of Brooklyn society; many would go on to play major roles in the Brooklyn Institute, and in other civic organizations.
In 1825 a building site for the Apprentices’ Library was selected at Cranberry and Henry Streets, and on July 4, Revolutionary War Hero Marquis de Lafayette laid its cornerstone.
Of this event, Walt Whitman, who served a stint as acting librarian of the Apprentices’ Library, wrote in the Brooklyn Standard on January 25, 1862
The writer of these veracious pen-jottings remembers the whole occasion and scene with perfect distinctness, although he was then only a little boy in his seventh year. The day was a very pleasant one.
The whole village, with all its population, old and young, gentle and simple, turned out en-masse. The principal regular feature of the show was, (for want of any military,) the marshaling into two parallel lines, with a space of twenty feet between them, of all the boys and girls of Brooklyn. These two lines, facing inward, made a lane, through which Lafayette rode slowly in a carriage. It was an old-fashioned yellow coach; and, indeed, the whole proceeding was of an ancient primitive kind, very staid, without any cheering, but then a plentiful waving of white pocket handkerchiefs from the ladies. The two lines of boys and girls ranged from Fulton Ferry landing along up to Henry Street. As our readers will understand, it was something very different from such a turnout of modern date, as that which welcomed the Prince of Wales or the Japanese Ambassadors, or president Lincoln last Spring. Still, as near as we can remember, it must have had an air of simplicity, naturalness and freedom from ostentation or clap-trap—and was not without a smack of antique grandeur too. For there were quite a number of "old revolutionaries" on the ground, and along the line of march; and their bent forms and white hair gave a picturesque contrast to the blooming faces of the boys and girls to be seen in all directions in such numbers. The sentiment of the occasion, moreover, made up in quality and in solemnity what was wanting in spangles, epaulettes, policemen, and brass bands—not the first sign of any of which graced the occasion.
Lafayette rode to the corner of Cranberry and Henry Streets, where he laid the corner stone of the Apprentices Library Building…
The library was briefly associated with the temperance movement. In 1828, the officers pledged to offer no intoxicants to their guests and tried to start an association discouraging the use of “ardent spirits.” Interestingly, one of the officers, Augustus Graham, had gained some of his wealth from distilleries, but had become an advocate of temperance. Their effort failed when the “ladies of their acquaintance” declared it to be “ungentlemanly,” and the attempt “to form a temperance society was abandoned.”
According to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, by 1829, the library had 1000 volumes and 189 readers, and the building was used by many civic organizations. Following Snow’s death, however, interest diminished. The building was sold to the city, and was used from 1834 to 1846 as Brooklyn’s temporary City Hall.