Birth and Early Life
He was born in Westchester County, New York, the son of Eunice (Barnard), and a potter, Elijah Cornell, and was raised near DeRuyter, New York. He was a cousin of Paul Cornell, the founder of Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. To the north Cornell is also a distant relative of William Cornell, who was an early settler of Scarborough, Ontario and named used for the planned community of Cornell, Ontario. Having traveled extensively as a carpenter in New York State, Ezra, upon first setting eyes on Cayuga Lake and Ithaca, decided Ithaca would be his future home.
The emigrant Thomas Cornell was probably Puritan at first then a follower of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson drifting into Quakerism which seems to have been the religion of his descendants. Written by John Cornell at the Cornell Homestead in So. Portsmouth, Rhode Island and dated August 7, 1901. Portsmouth, RI is noteworthy in American history for the 1638 Portsmouth Compact declaring for a separation of church and state rivaling the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657 declaring for religious tolerance in New Amsterdam, Quakers in particular.
Read more about this topic: Ezra Cornell
Famous quotes containing the words early life, birth, early and/or life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind—the mind of a fighter—in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man’s first beginning.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“What life is best?
Courts are but only superficial schools
To dandle fools:
The rural parts are turned into a den
Of savage men:
And where ‘s a city from all vice so free,
But may be termed the worst of all the three?”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)