American Biography: A New Cyclopedia has a more detailed description of the life of Margaret Olivia Slocum, who later in life became Mrs. Russell Sage and one of the nation’s greatest philanthropists. Born in 1828 and raised in Syracuse as the daughter of some old (like Miles Standish old) money, her father was impoverished by the panic of 1837, and from the age of nine Margaret had to help support the family. At 16 she set off for Mount Holyoke College, hoping to trade housework for tuition, but she became ill on the way and stopped at the home of an uncle in Troy to recover. Here she “was induced to enter the Troy Female Seminary, founded and then conducted by Miss Emma Willard, and from which she was honorably graduated after a serious struggle involving arduous labor and great self-denial amounting to privation.”
She then supported herself by teaching at schools in Syracuse, Troy, and Philadelphia, and at some point met Russell Sage, who had grown up in Troy and represented the area in Congress in the 1850s. He was on his way to being one of the nation’s leading financiers and railroad magnates, often in partnership with Jay Gould, when they married in 1869. Margaret was almost 41 years old; Russell was 12 years older.
“The mistress of one of the greatest fortunes in America, she maintained a simple home life, which was as acceptable to her husband as it was natural to herself … Her own manner of living was modest, to the avoidance of any unnecessary display of money, and her dress was habitually of a type worn by women of modest means.
“Five years before the death of her husband, he gave over to her the entire management of his business and of his fortune, a task for which she at once proved her adaptability, this due in large degree to what she had learned from him during their many consultations. At his death in 1906, the fortune she inherited from him was estimated at some seventy millions of dollars, and of this nearly one-half was expended by her in benevolences.”
They were some serious benevolences. She established the Russell Sage Foundation with a $10 million donation for the improvement of social and living conditions in the United States. She gave $1 million to create the new Emma Willard campus, and another $1 million for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. There was money for a public school at Sag Harbor, for the New York YMCA, the American Seaman’s Friend Association, the Home for Indigent Women, and more. She bought Constitution Island in the Hudson River and gave it to West Point. She built the Slocum Agricultural College at Syracuse University (now Slocum Hall), and expanded the Hospital of the Good Shepherd (now Huntington Hall). And she founded a little college in Troy on the former grounds of the Emma Willard School, the Russell Sage College of Practical Arts. She created a wildlife preserve in the Gulf of Mexico, and contributed greatly to the upkeep of New York’s Central Park.
That was just the tip of the iceberg, that was all while she was alive. Tomorrow we’ll look at what she left behind.