Life
She was born in 1835 and was raised by her grandmother in Clayton, New York. She met Cyrus Hall McCormick in 1857 while visiting friends in Chicago. They were married in 1858. While Cyrus was working out a controversy involving his patent of the reaper they lived in Washington, DC. She had a keen business sense and became a great asset to her husband. Nettie became his financial counselor and oversaw many of the business affairs. She toured expositions in McCormick’s interest making contacts for the company. The Great Fire destroyed McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. Despite Cyrus’s thoughts of retirement, Nettie insisted on rebuilding even larger than before.
The McCormicks provided $100,000 to bring the Hanover Seminary to Chicago. The school was renamed McCormick Theological Seminary soon after Cyrus’s death in 1884. Nettie continued to fund buildings, endowing professorships, and scholarships at the seminary even after his death. Nettie donated to over forty schools and colleges. At the time of her death she left more than $1 million to be divided among various institutions. At Tusculum College, one of the many colleges Nettie supported, every September 13 observes Nettie Fowler McCormick Service Day. On this day students perform community service in her honor. She is buried at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.
Read more about this topic: Nancy Fowler Mc Cormick
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws?
She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Don’t tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that, one knows that life has exhausted him.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic and Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)