Ichabod Washburn - Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Washburn was interested in setting up a vocational school for mechanics and wrote:

I have long been satisfied that a course of instruction might be adopted in the education of apprentices to mechanical employments, whereby moral and intellectual training might be united with the processes by which the arts of mechanism as well as skill in the use and adaptation of tools and machinery are taught, so as to elevate our mechanics as a class in the scale of intelligence and influence, and add to their personal independence and happiness, while it renders them better and more useful citizens, and so more like our Divine Master, whose youth combined the conversations of the learned with the duties of a mechanic's son, and whose ideas and teachings now underlie the civilization of the world.

Along with John Boynton, another prominent Worcester industrialist, he founded the Worcester County Free Institute of Industrial Science in 1865. Its name was later changed to Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The collaboration between Boynton, who wanted to teach science, and Washburn, who wanted to teach vocational skills, led to the university's philosophy of "theory and practice."

Washburn suffered a paralyzing stroke in February 1868 and died on December 31 of that year, only a month after the Institute opened and before the completion of the shop building. Boynton died before the first class entered in 1868. Their contributions to WPI in its infancy are memorialized by Boynton Hall and Washburn Shops, the first two buildings on the campus.