Joseph Earl Sheffield was an American financier and philanthropis, supported Yale University.
Background
He was born in Southport, Connecticut, United States, the son of Mabel (Thorp) and Paul King Sheffield. His father, who had moved from Stonington, had seen service on a privateer fitted out by his family during the Revolution; his mother was also a member of a seafaring family, a daughter of Capt. Walter Thorp of Southport, engaged in the West India trade.
Education
Sheffield completed his formal education at the age of fourteen, leaving the village school. He he continued his studies under Dr. Thomas Webb.
Career
He entered as clerk a store in New Bern, transferring the next year to the drugstore of Dr. Thomas Webb.
On a visit at Southport when the War of 1812 broke out, he undertook in the following spring to act as supercargo of a small vessel which ran the British blockade at Sandy Hook and brought back naval stores from New Bern. Remaining at New Bern, he conducted several similar and very profitable enterprises.
In 1814, before he was twenty-one, he became the partner in New Bern of a large dry-goods firm in New York. Faced by the disastrous fall in prices after the peace of 1815, he boldly sold the dry goods below cost but turned loss into profit by the quick shipment of naval stores. On a horseback trip of over a thousand miles, which he made in 1816-17 in search of an outlet for the remainder of the stock, he was impressed by the prospects of Mobile, Ala. , then a town of about a thousand inhabitants, still lacking a bank or any extensive trade, but at the outlet of two great rivers reaching into a rich cotton country.
He secured as detailed information as possible not only on the cotton crop but also on the harvests in Europe, and ascribed to this practice the fact that of twenty years in a very speculative trade only two were unsuccessful. In 1835, influenced by considerations of health and social environment, he removed to New Haven.
He gradually retired from the cotton trade. In close cooperation with an able engineer, Henry Farnam, he helped to finance the completion of the New Haven-Northampton canal, the railroad which succeeded it, and the railroad from New York to New Haven. Although he lost money in these enterprises, he contracted with Farnam to complete the unfinished part of the Michigan Southern Railroad, about 170 miles, over which the first train from the East entered Chicago in 1852; in that year he contracted to build 182 miles for the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad completed in 1854 and extended by a bridge across the Mississippi the next year. The contractors were paid for their work on the Rock Island in bonds and stock at par; Sheffield raised all the cash, about five million dollars, and divided the profits equally with Farnam.
He then retired from active business connections and devoted his energy to benefaction. He gave a generous part of a large fortune to education, gave steadily and wisely to the scientific department of Yale College.
He also gave liberally to Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, to the Berkeley Divinity School, Middletown, Connecticut (later in New Haven), and to local New Haven institutions.
He died in New Haven.
Achievements
Personality
He had judgment and courage, and in addition an appreciation, very unusual in that day, of the importance of accurate statistics as a basis of forecasting.
Connections
He had married on August 22, 1822, Maria, daughter of Col. John T. St. John of Walton, New York, who bore him nine children.