Background
Caleb Cope, the son of William and Elizabeth (Rohrer) Cope, was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, United States. His father died when Caleb was very young and he was cared for by his mother and maternal grandfather.
Caleb Cope, the son of William and Elizabeth (Rohrer) Cope, was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, United States. His father died when Caleb was very young and he was cared for by his mother and maternal grandfather.
Cope received a rudimentary education in a one-story log-cabin school-house and at the age of twelve or thirteen was bound out by his mother to John Wells, a storekeeper, with whom he served a four-year apprenticeship.
In 1815 Cope went to Philadelphia where his uncles, Israel and Jasper Cope, well-known merchants, had offered him a home. To their training he attributed much of his success. In 1820 his uncles discontinued their part of the business and conveyed all their merchandise to Caleb Cope and his cousin. The firm of Caleb Cope & Company, dealing principally in silks, became one of the wealthiest in the country. In 1857, however, came a panic and the failure of the firm. Cope was forced to sell his country seat, “Springbrook, ” near Iiolmesburg, and then removed to the St. Lawrence Hotel.
He was one of the founders and for many years president of the Merchants Hotel Company, which in 1861 opened the Continental Hotel, where Cope made his residence thenceforth. When the Civil War broke out, the government selected him to represent it in Europe for the purchase of supplies, but he was unable to accept the post. In 1864 he was elected president of the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society in which he had been a director since 1841, and to its service he successfully devoted the best efforts of the remaining years of his life, living to see it become the largest institution of its kind in America.
In his earlier years Cope had served as a director of the United States Bank, acting as its president in the temporary absence of Nicholas Biddle. He was one of the original trustees of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, and the Philadelphia agent for the Bank of Kentucky. He was a manager of the Pennsylvania Hospital, of the Institution for the Instruction of the Blind, and an active worker for other charitable organizations.
Cope was twice married: first, in 1835, to his cousin Abby Ann Cope who died in 1845, and in December 1864 to Josephine Porter of Nashville, Tennessee.