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:
“The only living works are those which have drained much of the author’s own life into them.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“Half life is over now,
And I meet full face on dark mornings
The bestial visor, bent in
By the blows of what happened to happen.
What does it prove? Sod all.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“He did not live, he observed life from a window, and too often was inclined to content himself with no more than what his friends told him they saw when they looked out of a window.... In the end the point of Henry James is neither his artistry nor his seriousness, but his personality, and this was curious and charming and a trifle absurd.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)