Girard College - Stephen Girard's Legacy

Stephen Girard's Legacy

Born in Bordeaux, France, Stephen Girard was the eldest of 9 children. His mother died when he was 11, and he left home at the age of 14 to spend the next 12 years sailing the seas and learning the international mercantile and shipping business.

Girard arrived in Philadelphia in June 1776 and remained there for the rest of his life. During his 55 years there, he became the richest American of his time.

Girard was married to Mary Lum from 1777 until her death in 1815. They had no children.

Girard’s first fortune was in international shipping and merchant activities. He sent his ships, crews, and captains around the world and deposited his growing wealth in the First Bank of the United States in Philadelphia. When the First Bank lost its charter in 1811, he bought the bank's building, left his money there, and reopened as the Bank of Stephen Girard. This made him America’s first private banker. He made his second fortune in banking and helped raise the $16 million required for the U.S. government to fight the War of 1812. Forklore has it incorrectly that he saved the government from bankruptcy. By the time of his death, his fortune totaled approximately $7.5 million.

One of the most interesting chapters of Girard’s life was his role in fighting Philadelphia’s yellow-fever epidemic in the summer of 1793. He was instrumental in running the city’s hospital at William Hamilton's home, “Bush Hill,” using his business skills to better organize the hospital’s health care and record keeping and becoming personally involved in nursing.

With the assistance of attorney William J. Duane in the 1820s, he wrote a long will outlining every detail of how his fortune would be used. He delighted in keeping the document secret, knowing that everyone wondered what would happen to his fortune. Immediately after his death, the provisions of his will were made public. In addition to extensive personal and institutional bequests, he left the bulk of his fortune to the City of Philadelphia to build and operate a residential school for needy children from single-parent households. This innovative social vision was considered extremely unusual both then and now: to use the Girard fortune not to endow another Ivy League university but to assist children in need. In 1831, the bequest was the largest single act of philanthropy in American history.

Girard’s will eventually became famous for his restriction that students must be “poor, white, male, orphans.” The school remained for needy white boys for over a century. From 1954, with the U. S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, there was increasing interest in integrating Girard College by race. After a long, bitter 14-year civil-rights struggle (including Martin Luther King's speaking at Girard’s front gates in August 1965), the first four black boys entered the school in September 1968 and the first black girls in 1984. Current enrollment is about evenly divided between boys and girls and about 80% African-American.

The Girard Estate remains open in perpetuity and provides much of the operating budget for the school.