Background
Edward Everett Ayer was born on November 16, 1841 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, United States to Elbridge Gerry and Mary Dean (Titcomb) Ayer.
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Ptolemy's geography: a brief account of all the printed editions down to 1730, with notes on some important variations observed in that of Ulm 1482, ... the world yet known on modern geographical c
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
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A Lumberman Bibliophile
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Edward Everett Ayer
Edit ProfileEducation
Ayer was educated at the first school built in Harvard, where books were very scarce.
Career
At the age of eighteen he joined an overland expedition to California. He stopped in Nevada, where he found a job in a quartz mill, working twelve hours a day, but as soon as possible he went on to San Francisco, where he arrived with twenty-five cents in his pocket.
Here he found work in a planing-mill, where he remained until the outbreak of the Civil War.
He enlisted in the First California Cavalry, company E, and during the following three years served in Arizona and New Mexico, winning the rank of lieutenant. Mustered out in the summer of 1864, he returned to his home in Harvard, Illinois, and with the gift from his father of a third interest in a general store he settled down and began his business career.
About the same time, on a business trip to Chicago he happened past a bookseller and negotiated to purchase Prescott’s full five-volume set on the conquests of Mexico and Peru. He later recalled this purchase as the moment that gave him the will and the power to further pursue his bibliophillic work.
He became a student of history and later, as wealth came in, began collecting books and manuscriots and, later still, antiquities of many kinds.
He began buying timber, first for the use of the Chicago & Northwestern Railway, and later furnishing ties and telegraph poles for most of the western roads, including the Union Pacific, the Santa Fé, and the Mexican Central.
Around 1880 he moved to Chicago, and in 1893, together with John B. Lord, formed the Ayer & Lord Tie Company.
By this time he had gradually built up one of the finest private libraries in the United States, particularly noteworthy for its source material on the native races of North America, the Hawaiian and the Philippine Islands.
In 1897 he decided to donate his extensive collection to the Newberry Library of Chicago, but the collection's size slowed the process down and it wasn't finished until 1911. Since then this collection is separately housed and administered as the Edward E. Ayer Collection on the North American Indian.
Ayer was one of the founders of the Field Museum of Natural History of Chicago.
When the old Fine Arts Building of the World's Fair became the Field Museum he presented to it his large collection of Indian paraphernalia and his fine library of illustrated books on ornithology, besides many antiquities from Italy, Egypt, and other lands.
In the midst of his other activities he found time to serve (1912-18) on the Board of Indian Commissioners from 1912 till 1918, and in 1913 made a personal investigation of the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin. Besides his home in Chicago, he maintained a summer home on Lake Geneva, and during the last fifteen years spent much time in California, where he was particularly identified with the effort to save the redwood forests.
Achievements
Works
book
-
Ptolemy's geography: a brief account of all the printed editions down to 1730, with notes on some important variations observed in that of Ulm 1482, ... the world yet known on modern geographical c
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
-
A Lumberman Bibliophile
(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
-
Ptolemy's geography: a brief account of all the printed editions down to 1730, with notes on some important variations observed in that of Ulm 1482, ... the world yet known on modern geographical c
Interests
Connections
Ayer married Emma Augusta Burbank on September 7, 1865. They had one daughter.
- Father:
- Elbridge Gerry Ayer
- Mother:
- Mary Dean (Titcomb) Ayer
- Spouse :
- Emma Augusta (Burbank) Ayer
- Daughter :
- Elizabeth (Ayer) Johnson
- Sister :
- Eva (Ayer) Law
- Sister :
- Anna Maria (Ayer) Burbank
- Sister :
- Mary (Ayer) Smith
- Sister :
- Julia Ann (Ayer) Minier
- Sister:
- Harriet L “Hattie” Ayer Towne
- Brother :
- Henry Clay Ayer
