Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Seventy Years

citizens of Worcester furnish the funds necessary to purchase a lot and erect a suitable building or buildings for its accommodations. " To sound out local sentiment on this point, a letter was sent on March 6 to about thirty influential and wealthy members of the community, informing them of the general proposition. So many favorable responses were received that a meeting was called for March 27, at which the subject would be more fully presented.

The group was skillfully chosen. It included merchants, manufacturers, and bankers, whose names would have contributed prestige to any local enterprise. It was probably realized that the support of at least two of the group was absolutely essential. One was Stephen Salisbury, and the other Ichabod Washburn.

Stephen Salisbury, the second of the name, was the landed proprietor and foremost citizen of the community. Son of a wealthy merchant, graduate with honors from Harvard College, and a member of the Massachusetts bar, he had devoted his long life to public service and to the administration of his property. He was a man of intelligence and culture combined with a forceful personality. At sixty-seven he had a background of service in city and state legislation, was president of two leading banks, director of railways, and president of the American Antiquarian Society. The abundance of his interest in the Institute was to be increasingly apparent during the remaining two decades of his life.

In his Commencement address of 1871, Mr. Salisbury said that the announcement of Mr. Boynton's project "came upon Mr. Ichabod Washburn with the shock of an earthquake, as it seemed to remove the ground from a good work on which he had exercised his mind for a long time with the zeal and thoroughness that were his prominent traits."

Dr. Sweetser gave a more complete account of Mr. Washburn's disturbed state of mind, recalling that:

eight or ten years before this time we had conversed together in regard to the great need there was of a school for the scientific education of mechanics.

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