The twelve months from September, 1890, after Dr. Harper had agreed to become President of the University, to September, 1891, when we removed to the East, were in some respects among the most congenial, healthful, and happy of my life. They were spent mainly in visiting Baptist colleges and academies and in correspondence with them.
I made an educational trip to the Puget Sound country, visiting the National Park and the Yosemite Valley on the way. I traveled also in the South, visiting Southern Baptist institutions of learning, and I visited too some of the colleges and theological seminaries in the East.
My work during this year as secretary of the American Baptist Education Society is summed up in my third annual report delivered at Birmingham, Alabama, where our Society, in connection with the Southern Baptist Convention, held its third annual meeting. This report, too detailed for reproduction here, shows in brief that in the two years since we had prepared our plans, mapped out our work, and actively entered on it, we had established the University of Chicago with present property of Two and a Quarter Millions, and added to the fund of our needy colleges and academies a Million and a Quarter more. But this does not tell the story of debts paid, of buildings repaired or constructed, of private endowments added, and of wills drawn. This busy year of correspondence and travel, with its wide personal inspection of schools and colleges, was, unconsciously to myself, laying the foundations of my future educational work, in connection with the origin, policies, and activities of the General Education Board.
It was the last half of this year (ending in September, 1891), my thirty-eighth, that formed the pivotal period of our family life. In the retrospect all our years, before and after, turn on those six months. In those months I removed the centre of my work from Chicago to New York, and our home became fixed in the East. In those months I entered on the permanent financial and philanthropic activities which proved to be the end for which all the previous years had been preparatory and educational.
The American Baptist Education Society had secured a liberal charter from the Legislature of New York, and had gradually changed the personnel of its Board, so as to make that city a convenient centre for its meetings. The wealth of the denomination was located in the East, and was most conveniently reached from New York, and if this wealth could be made available, the influence of the Society would be widest from that centre. It was undesirable, moreover, for the Society to be thought by Baptist colleges to be closely associated with, and therefore likely to be too much influenced by, the University of Chicago. This fact made Chicago objectionable as a residence for the secretary, though it was the geographical centre of his field. It seemed best to fix the headquarters of the Society in New York. This was my judgment, and it was shared by Mr. Rockefeller and Dr. Morehouse. But there was no need of an immediate change. In March of this year, however, Mr. Rockefeller brought the question to an immediate issue by requesting our early removal to New York, especially in order to assist him in his benevolences. On consultation at home we decided that we could move to New York in the late summer.
We were unwilling to take our little family into the city of New York, and so we determined to seek a home in some suburban town convenient to the city. In June I spent several days in studying suburban New York, and reduced the available towns to Summit, Mount Vernon, and Montclair. A visit to each decided me in favor of Montclair, and I rented as our home there, from September first onward, the house at number 180 Orange Road. We had shipped our goods about two weeks earlier and arrived with our little family at the Astor House, New York, August twenty-ninth, after a day at Niagara Falls and a good night’s rest in Buffalo. The next day we went out to Montclair and found, to our delight, that our car of household goods had just arrived. By September first we were living in our new home. Little Frederick was then nearly five years old, Franklin three, and Russell a little more than one. We were expecting in about six weeks a new baby which the doctor, with a tactful prevision, had intimated, to our great pleasure, would be a girl. It was Alice.
I arranged for an office in the Temple Court Building in New York City and began my work.
This removal to the East in 1891 invites a moment’s pause in our narrative. I was now in mid-life—thirty-seven. My youth and early manhood had been spent in the West. In the West had been my work since my student days. My pastorate of eight years had been in a Western city. I had helped to found the University of Chicago. My studies had been mainly of the West, its needs and its promise. All my intimate friends were Western men. My sympathies were Western. I had received my nourishment and growth from the Western soil. All our previous changes of home had been little more than changes of place. But now we were not removed merely; we were transplanted.
And the change was radical for our whole family. Our children were thus destined to be Eastern bred. They were to be reared and educated and ushered into life in the East and not in the West, in suburban New York, instead of suburban Chicago. The profoundest elements of destiny, education, marriage, and profession for every one of them were wrapped up in that transplanting.
I did not at the time formally renounce the ministry, but it proved in the end that in turning my face to the East I was turning my back forever on the ministry. My last sermon had been delivered and I was to give my future wholly to Mr. Rockefeller. The call that had taken me into the ministry, as the imperative of the largest service, that higher divine call which I had said at my ordination would, if it came, take me out of the ministry, had come.
Dr. Harper opposed my removal to New York. He first tried to dissuade Mr. Rockefeller on the plea that 1 was needed in Chicago. But Mr. Rockefeller was unmoved. Dr. Harper then offered me a professorship, and on my declination offered to make me comptroller of the University. These overtures I declined. I was already committed to Mr. Rockefeller, and I could be in fact more useful to the University in New York than in Chicago.
With the arrival of our little family at Montclair in 1891, our narrative divides itself into two branches. The first will follow our family life, the birth and training of our children, their education and their choice of vocation, and will conclude with their marriage and settlement in homes of their own.
The second will follow my daily work in New York City in the offices of the Messrs. Rockefeller, father and son, in connection with their finance and philanthropy, bringing the narrative to a conclusion in the present year of 1928.
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Chapters In My Life 