Background

Henry Villard was born on April 10, 1835, in Speyer, Rhenish Bavaria. He was the son of Gustav Leonhard Hilgard and Katharina Antonia Elisabeth (Pfeiffer) Hilgard.

He came from an important family, his father being a jurist who rose to the supreme court of Bavaria, while two of his uncles were leaders in the revolution of 1848 in Rhenish Bavaria.

Education

Young Heinrich's sympathy with their republican sentiments estranged him from his father and the boy was sent for a time to a military school at Phalsbourg in Lorraine. He graduated from the Gymnasium in Speyer, and attended the universities of Munich and Wurzburg for a time, but disagreed again with his father and emigrated to America.

Fearing that his father would have him returned to Germany and placed in the army, he adopted the name Villard, which had been borne by one of his schoolmates at Phalsbourg. Upon landing at New York in October 1853, he proceeded to the West by easy stages, spent sometime in Cincinnati and Chicago, and eventually arrived at the home of relatives in Belleville, Illinois.

Career

During the year 1855-56, Villard successively read law, peddled books, sold real estate, and edited a small-town newspaper, but made little progress along any line except the mastery of the English language. Increasing facility in the use of his adopted tongue served to equip him for the field of journalism, which was to occupy his attention largely for the next decade. In 1858, he served as a special correspondent for the Staats-Zeitung of New York, observed and reported the Lincoln-Douglas debates for that paper, began a personal friendship with Lincoln, and collected his Lincoln stories, which have since been widely quoted. Service with this German-American paper, however, he regarded merely as preliminary to his real objective a regular berth with the English-language press.

Late in 1858, reports of the discovery of gold in the Pike's Peak country so aroused his adventurous spirit that he conceived a plan for a journey to the Rocky Mountains in the role of a correspondent, made a connection with the Cincinnati Commercial, and in the spring of 1859 set out across the Plains. His sojourn of some months in the mining camps not only enabled him to make the acquaintance of several noteworthy men, including Horace Greeley, but provided him with the materials for a guidebook for immigrants which he published in 1860 under the title The Past and Present of the Pike's Peak Gold Regions, a very accurate account of the natural resources of Colorado and a rather extraordinary achievement for a young man of twenty-five who seven years before had not known a word of English.

As correspondent for the Commercial he covered the Republican National Convention at Chicago in 1860, and he served in a similar capacity for that paper, as well as for the Daily Missouri Democrat of St. Louis and the New York Tribune, during the ensuing campaign. With the election of Lincoln, he was selected by the New York Herald as its correspondent at Springfield, Illinois. Here he remained until the departure of Lincoln for Washington, supplying his paper with regular dispatches, which the Herald was forced to share with other members of the New York Associated Press.

Since at the same time, Villard corresponded freely with Western papers, a considerable portion of the political news which the country read during those memorable weeks was supplied by the young immigrant who had not yet turned his twenty-sixth birthday. With the outbreak of the Civil War, he supported the Union cause and became a war correspondent, first for the New York Herald, and later for the New York Tribune, accompanying the Union armies in Virginia and the West until late in November 1863, when ill health forced him to abandon field work for a time. The following year, in conjunction with the Washington representative of the Chicago Daily Tribune, he organized a news agency to compete with the New York Associated Press, and represented his agency with the Army of the Potomac in the campaign of 1864 in Virginia.

Upon the conclusion of the war, he served as a correspondent in the United States and Europe until the autumn of 1868, when he became secretary of the American Social Science Association, with headquarters in Boston. This work, in addition to bringing him into the movement for civil service reform, enabled him to study and investigate public and corporate financing, including that of railways and banks, and thus indirectly prepared him for the most notable phase of his career that of railway promoter and financier. In 1871, to restore his failing health, he went to Germany and then to Switzerland. In Germany again, in the winter of 1873, he was brought into contact with a protective committee for the bondholders of the Oregon & California Railroad Company. He became a member of the committee, and the following year was sent to Oregon as their representative, to investigate and recommend as to the future policy to be employed by the bondholders.

Meanwhile he had joined a committee for the protection of the bondholders of the Kansas Pacific Railway, and when in 1876 this company became financially embarrassed he was named a receiver for the road, a position which forced him to match his wits with such redoubtable foes as Jay Gould and Sidney Dillon of the Union Pacific.

After quietly buying the stock of the Company to the limit of his resources (December 1880 - January 1881), he appealed to his friends and supporters for assistance. Issuing a confidential circular to about fifty persons, he asked them to subscribe toward a fund of eight million dollars, the precise purpose of which was not then revealed. It is eloquent testimony to the confidence which he inspired in men that, besides the sum first requested, an additional twelve million dollars was eventually subscribed. This transaction, commonly known as the "Blind Pool, " remains one of the notable achievements in the annals of railway finance.

With the means thus secured he established his control of the Northern Pacific; he organized a holding company the Oregon & Transcontinental to harmonize the interests of his various railway properties; on September 15, 1881, he became president of the Northern Pacific, and completed the line in 1883.

Since he also controlled the Oregon & California Railroad, and had recently organized the Oregon Improvement Company for the development of the natural resources of the region, he now dominated every important agency of transportation in that part of the country. His triumph, however, was of short duration. Because of a combination of circumstances, including faulty estimates of construction costs, the Northern Pacific, upon its completion, was confronted with a huge deficit which forced the resignation of Villard from the presidency early in 1884.

From 1884 to 1886, he was in Germany, recovering from a nervous breakdown; in the latter year he returned to New York as agent of the Deutsche Bank. With the aid of German capital he saved the Oregon & Transcontinental in September 1887, and reentered the board of the Northern Pacific in 1888, where, for the next two years, he strove earnestly, but unsuccessfully, to effect an adjustment of the clashing interests of the various cities and transportation companies of the Pacific Northwest.

His failure in this effort was attended by his retirement from the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company, though after a brief interval he continued as chairman of the board of the Northern Pacific until 1893, when his railway career came to an end. Meanwhile Villard was displaying his versatility by activities along other lines. His early realization of the possibilities of the electrical industry prompted him to extend financial assistance to Thomas A. Edison and to found the Edison General Electric Company in 1889.

In 1881, he inaugurated, under the direction of Raphael Pumpelly, the Northern Transcontinental Survey, an examination of the Northern Pacific land grant of genuine scientific value. Nor had his activity as a financier dulled his earlier interest in journalism. When, through his financial successes with the Kansas Pacific and the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company, he became a man of wealth, his thoughts quickly turned to the possibility of controlling a journal of independence and fearlessness, and of such high editorial standards as to compel attention from the entire country.

Accordingly, in 1881, he acquired a controlling interest in the New York Evening Post, placed Horace White, E. L. Godkin, and Carl Schurz in charge of the editorial department, and, as a guarantee of independence on the part of the paper, promptly abdicated the right of influencing its editorial policy. In those years, he was frankly aiming at a monopoly of transportation facilities in the Pacific Northwest; yet he showed no disposition to take unfair advantage of such a position, or to victimize the people of the region. Although alert to the protection of his interests against rival companies, he displayed fairness, moderation, and breadth of view in dealing with the cities on the coast.

Achievements

• Henry Villard has been listed as a noteworthy journalist, railroad executive by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Contact! The Story of the Early Aviators

    ( This informative account recaptures the thrill of the p...)

  • The Past and Present of the Pike's Peak Gold Regions

    (The Past and Present of the Pike's Peak Gold Regions)

  • Lincoln on the eve of '61;: A journalist's story

Views

On his first visit to the region, Henry had been very favorably impressed with its possibilities and there gradually developed in his mind the idea of building a railway empire in the Far Northwest. Perceiving the great strategic value of the south bank of the Columbia River as a railway route, he purchased the Oregon Steam Navigation Company from Simeon Gannett Reed and his associates in 1879, organized the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company, and proceeded to construct a railway eastward from Portland along that route.

His plan was to make this line the Pacific Coast outlet for any northern transcontinental railway which might be built, and to concentrate the trade of the Northwest in Portland. As he progressed with his plans, however, he clashed with the Northern Pacific, then recovering from the financial disasters of the seventies, whose objective was Puget Sound.

Appreciating the great advantage which the superior harbor of the Sound would give the Northern Pacific over his own road with terminus at Portland, Villard resolved to prevent the completion of the rival road. When his offer of running rights over his line to tidewater was refused, he decided to purchase a controlling interest in the Northern Pacific.

Quotations: "There was nothing in all Douglas's powerful effort that appealed to the higher instincts of human nature, while Lincoln always touched sympathetic cords. Lincoln's speech excited and sustained the enthusiasm of his audience to the end. "

"I therefore shared fully the intense chagrin of the New York and other State delegations when, on the third ballot, Abraham Lincoln received a larger vote than Seward. "

"The curious defiled past him, after squeezing the Presidential fingers into the room, and settled either on the sofa or chairs or remained standing for protracted observations. "

Connections

On January 3, 1866, Villard married Fanny Garrison Villard, the only daughter of William Lloyd Garrison. They had four children.

Father:

Gustav Leonhard Hilgard

Mother:

Katharina Antonia Elisabeth Von Pfeiffer

Grandson:

Oswald Garrison "Mike" Villard Jr.

September 17, 1916 – January 7, 2004

Was a prominent professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University.

Grandson:

Henry Serrano Villard

March 30, 1900 – January 21, 1996

Was an American foreign service officer, ambassador and author.

Wife:

Fanny Garrison Villard

December 16, 1844 – July 5, 1928

Was a women's suffrage campaigner and a co-founder of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Daughter:

Helen Elise Villard

1868–1917

Was married Dr. James William Bell, an English physician, in 1897, and was a semi-invalid most of her life due to a childhood fall down an elevator shaft at the Westmoreland House.

Son:

Henry Hilgard Villard

1883–1890

He died young.

Son:

Harold Garrison Villard

1869–1952

Was married Mariquita Serrano (1864–1936), sister of Vincent Serrano, in 1897.

Son:

Oswald Garrison Villard

March 13, 1872 – October 1, 1949

Was an American journalist and editor of the New York Evening Post. He was a civil rights activist, a founding member of the NAACP.

References

• Jugend-Erinnerungen, 1835-1853 (1902) (German Edition)
• Villard: The Life and Times of an American Titan