founder merchant philanthropist physician
He was born in 1810 in a farmhouse in Upper Freehold Township, Monmouth County, N. J. , the youngest of a family of seven. His father, Edward, descended from Edward Taylor who settled in Monmouth County in 1692, was a country physician, a graduate of the College of New Jersey.
Joseph was educated at a boarding school near Frankford, and later studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received the degree of M. D. at the early age of twenty.
In 1830 he sailed for India as surgeon and supercargo on a merchant vessel. Three years after his return he set off to join his brother Abraham, who had successfully established himself ten years earlier in Cincinnati as a tanner and dealer in leather. Joseph became purchasing agent for the firm and traveled widely in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana.
After fifteen prosperous years Taylor, an ardent traveler, started on his first European tour, and two years later settled in Burlington, N. J. , where he purchased an estate and lived the life of a country gentleman. He was unmarried, but was devoted to his sister Hannah who kept house for him and had several warm friendships with other cultivated women.
In 1861 he took another trip to England and the Continent, and in his later life traveled much in the United States. He was able to increase his fortune very materially by judicious investments after retiring from his brother's business.
Taylor was interested in most of the causes supported by the Society of Friends, such as abolition of slavery and promotion of international peace, temperance, and education. His determination to found a woman's college, which appears to have been fixed by the year 1875, probably had its origin in his perception of the real need for such an institution for the education of Quaker girls and his feeling that it was consistent with Quaker principles to provide the same facilities for the higher education of women in the neighborhood of Philadelphia as was provided for the education of men at Haverford College, of which he had been one of the managers since 1854. His first plan was to open the college at Burlington near his own house in order to direct its growth himself. He was persuaded by his advisers, of whom Francis King, the president of the trustees of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, was the most trusted, that it would be wise to find a location more convenient to Philadelphia. President Gilman of Johns Hopkins, President Seelye of Smith, and other experienced educators were consulted, and two trips were made to New England to visit Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Wellesley. Land was purchased at Bryn Mawr, eleven miles from Philadelphia, in 1878, and the building begun in 1879. Taylor directed the architect to use the administration building at Smith College as the model for the main building, later named Taylor Hall. He superintended the work of construction himself, making almost daily trips to Bryn Mawr. These activities were apparently too strenuous for his health and hastened his death, which resulted from heart disease.
He bequeathed practically his entire fortune of about eight hundred thousand dollars, in addition to the land and buildings, to Bryn Mawr College, appointing a board of trustees of eminent Quakers, among them Dr. James E. Rhoads, later president of the College. While unquestionably Taylor's purpose in founding Bryn Mawr was in part religious and even sectarian, it is clear from his choice of advisers and careful consideration of the need for educational facilities in the broadest sense that he wished to found a college which would be preëminent in cultivating the intellectual as well as the spiritual interests of the rising generation of women.
The Taylors were Baptists, but Edward joined the Society of Friends.
Quotations:
"I have been impressed with the need of such a place for the advanced education of our young female Friends, and to have all the advantages of a College education which are so freely offered to young men. "
Joseph W. Taylor on founding Bryn Mawr College
Descriptions picture him as of medium height, unusually handsome in feature, exquisitely neat in dress, and distinguished in carriage.
He married to Sarah Merritt, whose family had been among the early Quaker settlers of New Jersey. Sarah Taylor "had a concern" (in the Quaker phrase) for the insane, and in 1823 she and her husband became respectively matron and physician of the Friends' Asylum near Frankford, a suburb of Philadelphia.
