Ezra Cornell, the son of a farmer and potter, was a self-educated and self-made man. From his early years, he was interested in scientific and technical innovation. He devised a special plow for laying telegraph cable underground and later designed glass insulators for stringing cable overhead. He struggled financially for most of his life until 1855, when the consolidation into Western Union of the small local telegraph companies in which he had invested gave his interests 150,000 shares of stock. In 1864, he wrote in his old “cyphering book”:

The yearly income which I realize this year will exceed One Hundred Thousand dollars - My last quarterly dividend on stock in the Western Union Telegraph Co was $35,000, July 20, 64….

My greatest care now is how to spend this large income, to do the most good to those who are properly dependent on [me], to the poor and to posterity.

Cornell had long been interested in education, both for his own children and more broadly. He helped organize a Farmers’ Club, with an agricultural reading room in Ithaca; he served as president of the Tompkins County Fair, and of the New York State Agricultural Society. Ezra Cornell had always had an enormous respect for books and for their influence. He purchased books for his family, even when he had little money. In 1863, he proposed to build and endow a public library for Ithaca. He had entered politics, and in the New York State Senate, he met Andrew Dickson White when the bill for the incorporation of the library was referred to White’s Committee on Literature (Education). At the time, Cornell was the oldest member of the Senate and White the youngest.

Ezra Cornell kept the first book he ever owned, and in 1859, he presented it to the Ithaca Farmers Club library. The book eventually was given to the Cornell Library, and is now on permanent deposit in the Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

In 1866, he annotated it:

Price one dollar. This is the first book I ever owned. It was offered by a pedler at my Fathers house in De Ruyter Madison Co NY. I persuaded my Mother to buy it for me. She had no money, and to oblige me she picked up paper rags about the house to make up the price of it. I read the book with interest, but when Jackson was a candidate in 1828 for the Presidency, I opposed him and voted for Adams. I favored a protective tariff.

Ezra Cornell

That book is:

S. Putnam Waldo. Memoirs of Andrew Jackson, Major-General in the Army of the United States and Commander in Chief of the Division of the South. Hartford: J. & W. Russell, 1819.

In 1863, Cornell asked his counselor and trusted friend, Francis Miles Finch, an Ithaca native and Yale-educated lawyer with the law firm of Boardman and Finch, to assist him in drawing up a charter for a Library Association. Cornell purchased a lot on Tioga Street along the south side of Seneca, across the street from the City Hall, at a cost of $2,772.97. In order to obtain public support and cooperation, he formed an advisory committee of local citizens to help him. William Hodgins, an Albany architect, was chosen to prepare the plans.

The building included not only the library room with a capacity for holding 30,000 volumes, but also reading rooms, a lecture room seating 800 people, and space for community organizations like the DeWitt Guard, the Ithaca Farmer’s Club, and the Ithaca Historical Society. In order to make the library self-supporting, the building contained commercial space for a post office, a bank, and other businesses. The Cornell Library was incorporated on April 5, 1864 and formally “presented to the citizens of Tompkins Co. N.Y. as a free Public Library” on December 20, 1866.

At the opening of the Library, Ezra Cornell contributed 3,000 volumes, with the stipulation that he would add 1,000 volumes each year for twelve years. Many other community members also donated books to the library. At the Dedication, it was further proposed that every person present should “during the ensuing holiday week, present to the Cornell Library at least one good book as a Christmas gift.”

For many years it was the largest building in Ithaca. It was sold in 1960 to the First National Bank of Ithaca, and was demolished soon thereafter.

At the Cornell Library on Wednesday, October 7, 1868, a warm and bright autumn day, Cornell University celebrated its first Inauguration Day. On campus, the Arts Quad was little more than a cow pasture, and only one still-unfinished building (Morrill Hall) stood, but several hundred people attended the ceremonies. At 10:00 in the morning, President Andrew Dickson White, the Faculty, and the Trustees entered as the audience of distinguished guests, students, and citizens arose and the band played “Hail to the Chief.” Because of the controversy over the new university’s nonsectarian foundation, Gov. Reuben E. Fenton did not attend the ceremonies, but was represented by Lt. Gov. Stewart L. Woodford, a strong supporter of the new institution.

Ezra Cornell delivered a brief address, in which he said:

I hope we have laid the foundation of an institution which shall combine practical with liberal education, which shall fit the youth of our country for the professions, the farms, the mines, the manufactories, for the investigations of science and for mastering all the practical questions of life with success and honor. I believe that we have made the beginning of an institution which will prove highly beneficial to the poor young men and the poor young women of our country . . . I trust we have laid the foundation of an university - ‘an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.’

Lt. Gov. Woodford administered the oath of office to Andrew Dickson White and presented him with the Charter, Seal and keys of the university. White delivered an address in which he asserted the formative ideals of the new university and declared its educational independence.

Cornell’s historian, Morris Bishop, credits the first inauguration decorations for the choice of carnelian or red as Cornell’s color:

Students and citizens thronged to Library Hall. . . . On the side wall the motto of the new university was blazoned in evergreen letters and behind the speakers the illustrious names of CORNELL and WHITE appeared in large white letters against artistically draped red flannel, on which stars cut out of silver paper were pinned at pleasing intervals. Thus, entirely unintentionally, the Cornell colors were established for all time, on the first Cornell banner.

In its early years, the Cornell Library downtown had close ties to the University. For the first twenty years, the Board of Trustees held its meetings in the boardroom of the First National Bank, located in the Library, and Andrew Dickson White was elected as the university’s first president there on November 21, 1866.

And, as Thomas Frederick (“Teefy”) Crane, Professor of Romance Language and Literature and acting president of Cornell (1900-1901) later reminisced:

Here Ezra Cornell had a tiny office next to the post office.… In this office the first meeting of the faculty of Cornell University was held in October, 1868 . . . . It was from this office [Boardman and Finch] that I saw Cornell University gradually come into being.

Lectures and meetings were held in library facilities. The announcement and course catalog, the Cornell Register noted: “Large numbers of persons of both sexes, not formally connected with the University, have attended many of the courses of lectures, particularly those of the President and of Professor Goldwin Smith” and the other non-resident faculty. Students took their entrance examinations in the Library’s DeWitt Guards’ Drill Hall, and Commencement exercises were held in the Lecture Hall until 1883, when the Old Armory was completed on campus.

When Ezra Cornell died in 1874, his coffin was brought to the Library and more than 4,000 people filed past the bier.

The Cornell Register described the Library:

Members of the University are also entitled to the use of the Cornell Library, founded in the village of Ithaca, by Mr. Cornell in 1864, at an expense of one hundred thousand dollars. It is a library of circulation, containing a large and constantly growing collection of works in history, voyages, travels, and general literature. Its reading-room possesses a good selection of political and literary journals, domestic and foreign.