Leland Stanford

Long suffering from locomotor ataxia, Leland Stanford died of heart failure at home in Palo Alto, California, on June 21, 1893. He was buried in the family mausoleum on the Stanford campus. Jane Stanford died in 1905 after being poisoned with strychnine.

The Stanfords donated approximately United States dollar 40 million (equivalent to $1,138,000,000 today) to develop the university, which held its opening exercises on October 1, 1891 and was intended for agricultural studies. Its first student, admitted to Encina Hall that day, was Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the 31st US President. The wealth of the Stanford family during the late 19th century is estimated at about $50 million (equivalent to $1,537,000,000 today).

Stanford was elected chairman of the Southern Pacific Railroad's executive committee in 1890, and he held this post and the presidency of the Central Pacific Railroad until his death.

Later, he served in the United States Senate from 1885 until his death in 1893. He served for four years as chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds,and also served on the Naval Committee. He was president and director of the Central Pacific Railroad the entire time he sat in the Senate. He authored several Senate bills that advanced ideas advocated by the People's Party: a bill to foster the creation of worker-owned cooperatives, and a bill to allow the issuance of currency backed by land value instead of only the gold standard. Neither bill made it out of committee. In Washington, DC, he had a residence on Farragut Square near the home of Baron Karl von Struve, Russian minister to the US.

The Southern Pacific Company was organized in 1884 as a holding company for the Central Pacific-Southern Pacific system. Stanford was president of the Southern Pacific Company from 1885 until 1890 when he was forced out of that post (as well as the presidency of the Southern Pacific Railroad) by Collis Huntington, the company's ranking vice president and the corporate directorate. That was thought to be retaliation for Stanford's election to the US Senate in 1885 over Huntington's friend, Aaron A. Sargent.

Stanford moved with his family from Sacramento to San Francisco in 1874, where he assumed presidency of the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company, the steamship line to Japan and China associated with the Central Pacific.

Stanford was also interested in horses and owned the Gridley tract of 17,800 acres (72 km) in Butte County. In Santa Clara County, he founded his Palo Alto Stock Farm. He bred Standardbred horses to be raced as trotters, including his chief sire, Electioneer (sired by Hambletonian) and his winning offspring: Arion, Sunol, Palo Alto, and Chimes (out of Stanford's best known dam Beautiful Bells); and Thoroughbreds for flat racing. In 1872, Stanford commissioned the photographer Eadweard Muybridge to undertake scientific studies of the gaits of horses at a trot and gallop at the Agricultural Park race track in Sacramento. Images of the horses' feet were captured there, later moving to his Palo Alto Stock Farm. He wanted to determine if the horses ever had all four feet off the ground at the same time. The result was the proto-film Sallie Gardner at a Gallop (1878). As the Palo Alto breeding farm was later developed into the Stanford University, the university was nicknamed "The Farm."

As head of the railroad company that built the western portion of the "First Transcontinental Railroad" from Sacramento eastward over the Sierra Nevada mountains in California to Nevada and Utah, Stanford presided at the ceremonial driving of "Last Spike" in Promontory, Utah on May 10, 1869. The grade of the CPRR met that of the Union Pacific Railroad, which had been built westward from its eastern terminus at Council Bluffs, Iowa/Omaha, Nebraska. He was even given the honor of driving the final spike.

In May 1868, he joined Lloyd Tevis, Darius Ogden Mills, H.D. Bacon, Hopkins, and Crocker in forming the Pacific Union Express Company. It merged in 1870 with Wells Fargo and Company. Stanford was a director of Wells Fargo and Company from 1870 to January 1884. After a brief retirement from the board, he served again from February 1884 to his death in June 1893.

He was the eighth Governor of California, serving from January 1862 to December 1863, and the first Republican governor. Due to the Great Flood of 1862, the governor was said to have needed to row in a boat to his own inauguration. A large, slow-speaking man who always read from a prepared text, he impressed his listeners as being more sincere than a glib, extemporaneous speaker.

In 1856, he and Jane moved to Sacramento, where he engaged in mercantile pursuits on a large scale. He was one of the four merchants known popularly as "The Big Four" (or among themselves as "the Associates"), who were the key investors in Chief Engineer Theodore Dehone Judah's plan for the Central Pacific Railroad. Th of them incorporated it on June 28, 1861, and Stanford was elected as its president. The other three associates were Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Collis P. Huntington.

Stanford ran unsuccessfully for governor of California in 1859. He was nominated again in 1861 and won the election. He served one term, then limited to two years.

Stanford was politically active and became a leading member of the Republican Party. In 1856, he met with other Whig politicians in Sacramento on April 30 to organize the California Republican Party at its first state convention. He was chosen as a delegate to the Republican Party convention that selected US presidential electors in both 1856 and 1860. Stanford was defeated in his 1857 bid for California state treasurer, and his 1859 bid for the office of governor of California. In 1860, he was named a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Chicago but did not attend. He was elected governor in a second campaign in 1861.

In 1852, having lost his law library and other property to a fire, Stanford followed his five brothers to California during the California Gold Rush. His wife, Jane, returned temporarily to Albany and her family. He went into business with his brothers and became the keeper of a general store for miners at Michigan City, California, later the name changed to Michigan Bluff in Placer County; later he had a wholesale house. He served as a justice of the peace and helped organize the Sacramento Library Association, which later became the Sacramento Public Library. In 1855, he returned to Albany to join his wife but found the pace of Eastern life too slow after the excitement of developing California.

On September 30, 1850, Stanford married Jane Elizabeth Lathrop in Albany, New York. She was the daughter of Dyer Lathrop, a merchant of that city, and Jane Anne (Shields) Lathrop. The couple did not have any children for years, until their only child, a son, Leland DeWitt Stanford, was born in 1868 when his father was forty-four.

After being admitted to the bar in 1848, Stanford moved with many other settlers to Port Washington, Wisconsin, where he began a law practice with Wesley Pierce. His father presented him with a law library said to be the finest north of Milwaukee. In 1850, Stanford was nominated by the Whig Party as Washington County, Wisconsin district attorney.

Stanford's father was a farmer of some means. Stanford was raised on family farms in the Lisha Kill and Roessleville (after 1836) areas of Watervliet. The family home in Roessleville was called Elm Grove. The Elm Grove home was razed in the 1940s. Stanford attended the common school until 1836 and was tutored at home until 1839. He attended Clinton Liberal Institute, in Clinton, New York, and studied law at Cazenovia Seminary in Cazenovia, New York, in 1841 to 1845. In 1845, he entered the law office of Wheaton, Doolittle and Hadley in Albany.

Amasa Leland Stanford (March 9, 1824 – June 21, 1893) was an American industrialist and politician. He was the founder (with his wife, Jane) of Stanford University. Migrating to California from New York at the time of the Gold Rush, he became a successful merchant and wholesaler, and continued to build his business empire. He spent one two-year term as Governor of California after his election in 1861, and later eight years as a United States Senator. As president of Central Pacific Railroad, beginning in 1861, and later Southern Pacific, he had tremendous power in the region and a lasting impact on California. He is widely considered a robber baron.