Henry W. Sage

Henry W. Sage

Henry Williams Sage (January 31, 1814 – September 18, 1897) was a wealthy New York State businessman, philanthropist, and early benefactor and trustee of Cornell University.

Sage was born in Middletown, Connecticut, and spent part of his early childhood in Bristol, Connecticut before moving to Ithaca, New York in 1827. Two uncles, Timothy S. Williams and Josiah B. Williams, were New York State Senators from the Ithaca area. After briefly studying medicine, he began work for his uncles' forwarding firm, with a line of barges on the Erie Canal, which he took over by 1837. In 1847, he was elected to the New York State Assembly as a Whig.

In 1854, he purchased a tract of land at Bell Ewart on Lake Simcoe, 51 miles north of Toronto, Ontario, Canada and was soon processing timber on a large scale. From that point, the Ontario, Simcoe and Huron Union Railroad (see Northern Railway of Canada) carried the lumber to its wharves in Toronto, offering Sage a reduced rate for a specified number of carloads per month. The lumber was shipped across Lake Ontario to Sage's wholesale lumber yards at Albany, N.Y. He did not own the timber lands on Lake Simcoe, but rather purchased logs from farmers eager to clear their lands.

Moving to Brooklyn in 1857, he became active in the Plymouth Congregational Church, where the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (son of Lyman Beecher and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe) was pastor. He would later endow the Lyman Beecher Lectureship on Preaching at Yale Divinity School.

About this time he was also purchasing lumber in Michigan, as the Ontario supply began to wane. In 1863, he became a business partner with John McGraw. The two founded the town of Wenona, Michigan (named for the mother of Hiawatha and now part of Bay City) in 1864. The two earned a fortune in lumber and land in Wisconsin, Michigan, and New York.

In 1865 Sage purchased timber berths in Oakley township, Muskoka, necessary to keep the Bell Ewart mill running. The construction of a canal was required to run the logs from the Black River to Lake Couchiching. With previous experience on the New York State Assembly and legislation involving improvements to the Eire Canal, he attracted the interest of other Lake Simcoe lumbermen to form the Rama Timber Transport Company in 1868. The canal to divert the logs into Lake Couchiching opened in 1869, later that year Sage sold the Bell Ewart mill and associated timber berths to Messrs. Silliman and Beecher. Young Harry Beecher was a nephew of Sage's pastor, Rev. Henry Ward Beecher.

He funded construction of what is now the Sage Branch of the Bay County Library in 1884. It was designed by Cornell architecture professor Charles Babcock in the French Château-style, and is today a historical landmark.