John Harvard (clergyman) - Benefactor of Harvard College

Benefactor of Harvard College

Two years before his death the Massachusetts colony—desiring to "advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity: dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust"—appropriated £400 toward a "schoale or colledge" at what was then called Newtowne. In an oral will spoken to his wife the childless Harvard, who had inherited considerable sums from his father, mother, and brother, bequeathed £780 (half of his monetary estate, with the remainder to his wife) as well as (and perhaps more importantly) his 320-volume scholar's library to the "schoale or Colledge" recently authorized by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It was subsequently ordered "that the Colledge agreed upon formerly to bee built at Cambridg shalbee called Harvard Colledge."

Even before Harvard's death Newtowne, the settlement surrounding the proposed college, had been renamed Cambridge, after the university attended by many early colonists including Harvard (and where he is memorialized by a tablet and stained-glass window in the Emmanuel College chapel).

A statue in Harvard's honor—though not a likeness of him, there being no indication at all of what he had looked like—is a prominent feature of Harvard Yard, and was depicted on the United States Postal Service's 1986 John Harvard stamp (part of its Great Americans series). The Boston–Cambridge Harvard Bridge is named for him, as is the John Harvard Library in Southwark.