History
Olin used the foundation for personal giving, including gifts for a chemical engineering building in the Engineering Quadrangle at Cornell University and a vocational high school in Alton, Illinois. In creating the foundation, Olin passed control of what would become the Olin Corporation to his sons, Spencer and John, while donating controlling shares to the foundation. "The old man then took his marbles out of the game," as Fortune described the transaction. "He plunked his stock into a charitable foundation. . . . If the boys did not want control of the company to pass to the foundation on his death, they’d jolly well have to hustle up the money to buy back the shares." The Olin sons did that, which left $50 million in the foundation's corpus, making it one of the largest foundations in the country.
After Olin died in 1951, his three trustees—Charles L. Horn, an Olin business associate; tax attorney James O. Wynn, and financial consultant Ralph Clark—continued Olin's grant program under the same principles as his Cornell gift: funding academic buildings while paying the full cost, including equipment and furnishings. They hired no staff and administered the program at the trustee level. Grants to vocational schools in the segregated South required that schools be racially integrated.
In the 1970s, new board members were elected: business executive Carlton T. Helming, lawyer Lawrence W. Milas, and business executive William B. Horn (son of previous board member Charles). Horn and Helming were later replaced by William Norden and William Schmidt. They continued the previous pattern of grantmaking until 1997. From 1938 to 1997, the Olin Foundation distributed grants for 78 buildings at 58 institutions, including F. W. Olin Hall at the University of Denver and the Olin Fine Arts Center at Washington and Jefferson College. “We always had a bias toward supporting science and engineering schools because Mr. Olin was an engineer,” Milas said.
Read more about this topic: F. W. Olin Foundation
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