Daniel Kimball Pearsons was born on April 14, 1820 in Bradford, Orange County, Vermont, United States beside the Connecticut River, in a farmhouse that served also as a wayside inn. His father, John Pearsons, was of Scotch ancestry. His mother, whom he resembled in physical and mental qualities, was Hannah (Putnam) Pearsons, a distant relation of Gen. Israel Putnam.
Daniel Kimball Pearsons studied in academies at Bradford and Newbury, and attended Dartmouth College during the freshman year, boarding himself and living on less than one dollar a week, a part of which expense he met by sawing wood at twenty-five cents a cord. In 1841 he graduated from the Vermont Medical College, Woodstock.
Daniel Kimball Pearsons started his career in Chicopee, Massachussets, and was promptly successful. At his wife suggestion he sold both their home and his practice in 1851, with a view to entering business, for which she thought he possessed special aptitude. They spent six months in Europe, and then for a few years Pearsons introduced textbooks on physiology, lecturing on the subject in the colleges of several Southern states, in the East, and in the interior. Being asked by acquaintances in Massachusetts to undertake the sale of their farm lands in Illinois, he went to Chicago in 1860 and later became agent for the sale of many thousands of acres held by private owners and by the Illinois Central Railroad Company. An eastern life insurance company also entrusted funds to him for loaning on farm mortgages. Hay was selling at one dollar and a half per ton and corn at ten cents a bushel, but Pearsons inspired possible buyers and despondent farmers with his courage and foresight of future values. In a few years he had sold 200, 000 acres.
Daniel Kimball Pearsons became a director of Chicago banks and other enterprises, and against the advice of friends invested largely in Michigan pine lands which became very valuable. He served on the Chicago city council, 1873 - 1876, and as chairman of its finance committee gave important assistance in rehabilitating the city's finances which had been demoralized by the devastating fire of 1871. He was one of the founders of the Presbyterian Hospital, 1883, and president of its board for about five years. In 1885 he removed to Hinsdale, Illinois, and in 1889 retired from business to devote himself to giving away his fortune. After making a few preliminary gifts, he sailed with his wife for a year in Europe and the Near East. Returning in 1890 he set himself with characteristic thoroughness and zest to the work he had projected for the next twenty years for he fully expected to live to the age of ninety. Keenly interested in education from his youth, he was convinced that the colleges of the West and South were of utmost importance to the future of America. At that time they were meagerly endowed and ill able to meet growing educational requirements.
Pearsons decided to devote to selected colleges the bulk of his fortune, about five million dollars, by making gifts conditioned upon the securing by the colleges of larger total amounts from others, thus stimulating the institutions to increased exertions and multiplying the number of their supporters. In this way he imparted a powerful stimulus to some forty colleges and several secondary schools. The colleges specially singled out by him for repeated gifts were Whitman (Washington), Pomona (California), Lake Forest (Illinois), Knox (Illinois), Yankton (South Dakota), Berea (Kentucky), Mount Holyoke (Massachusetts), and, for the largest amount of all, Beloit (Wisconsin). He also gave liberally to the Chicago Young Men's Christian Association, Chicago Theological Seminary, Chicago City Missionary Society, and to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Pearsons was as unusual in characteristics as in career.
Daniel Kimball Pearsons died at ninety-two on April 27, 1912, having divested himself of all his possessions excepting a small annuity and regarding himself as one of the happiest men in the world.
Daniel Kimball Pearsons was a firm believer in Christian institutions, especially in Christian education.
Daniel Kimball Pearsons was a tall, erect, with piercing black eyes, abrupt and unconventional in speech, caustic in criticisms, adamant in refusals, an iconoclast yet a reverent idealist, a rigid economist and a princely giver, severe in manner but profound in his affections. He was regarded by those who knew him but slightly as an interesting eccentric. Those, who understood him honored and loved him.
In August 1847 Daniel Kimball Pearsons married Marrietta Chapin, daughter of Deacon Giles Chapin of Chicopee. At the end of his career Pearsons emphatically ascribed much of the credit for his philanthropies to his wife.
