Background
Benjamin Godfrey was born on December 4, 1794, in Chatham, Massachusets, and ran away to sea when he was nine years old. His first voyage took him to Ireland, where he stayed nine years.
Financier merchant philanthropist sea-captain
Benjamin Godfrey was born on December 4, 1794, in Chatham, Massachusets, and ran away to sea when he was nine years old. His first voyage took him to Ireland, where he stayed nine years.
During the War of 1812, Godfrey served in the United States Navy and learned navigation. Later, he was captain of a merchantman, sailing from Chatham to Spain, Italy, and the West Indies, but he lost his ship during a storm in the Gulf of Mexico.
He then set up as a merchant at Matamoros, Mexico, near the mouth of the Rio Grande, accumulated a fortune of $200, 000, and was transporting it on pack-mules to the States when he was waylaid by brigands and robbed of the whole amount.
He began again in New Orleans, prospered, and moved in 1832 to Alton, Illinois, where the next year, he and Winthrop S. Gilman, later a banker in New York, began a storage and commission business. In their warehouse, Elijah Parish Lovejoy stored his printing-press before the fatal attack of November 7, 1837.
In 1835, using means that were reprehensible even though within the law, he and his partner secured control of the newly chartered state bank and proceeded to lend money freely to themselves and their friends.
Within a few years Godfrey, Gilman & Company, as drawers, discounters, and indorsers, received $800, 748 from the bank.
They used this money in a reckless attempt to divert the upper Mississippi trade from St. Louis to Alton, but their scheme to corner the lead market failed disastrously, and the panic of 1837, hastened the final reckoning.
Godfrey and Gilman resigned their positions in the bank, which had lost by their bad judgment $1, 000, 000 and all prospects of future usefulness; and the legitimate business interests of Alton, damaged also by the acquittal of Lovejoy’s murderers, suffered in consequence for years.
Meanwhile, in the heyday of his prosperity, Godfrey, who was much impressed with the necessity for proper educational facilities for girls, had founded Monticello Female Seminary at Godfrey, a few miles north of Alton, had selected Theron Baldwin as the first principal, and had given the institution $110, 000.
He was a trustee of the school until his death and always solicitous of its welfare; to him almost as much as to Baldwin belongs the credit for the high standard that it maintained from its opening in 1838.
Godfrey was also the projector and president of the Alton & Sangamon Railroad, now a link in the Chicago & Alton, which was chartered in 1847 and completed to Springfield in 1852. While the line was building, he lived in a car and followed the work as it advanced.
In 1853, citizens of Alton presented him with a silver pitcher with representations in repoussé of the first train on the railroad and of the original building of the Seminary.
He died at his home in Godfrey, Illinois.
Godfrey built a church in Lower Alton that was later to become St. Paul's Episcopal Church. He became involved with the Presbytery and established Monticello Seminary for women, now known as Lewis and Clark Community College. He is the namesake of Godfrey, Illinois, where the school is located, and the Benjamin Godfrey Memorial Chapel found there.
Godfrey was shrewd, daring, and tenacious, and life on the seas and in remote trading ports had made him somewhat high-handed.
Godfrey was twice married, the second time to a Miss Pettit of Hempstead, Long Island.
