REPORT OF EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE liii 



MEMORIALS. 



Abram S. Hewitt. 



Abram Stevens Hewitt, one of the confidential advisers of Mr. 

 Carnegie respecting the foundation of this Institution, and by elec- 

 tion the original Chairman of the Board, died at his home, in New 

 York, January i8, 1903, aged 81 years. By his death the Trustees 

 have met an irreparable loss. The Cooper Union, with which he 

 was intimately associated during all its history, has published a 

 summary of his life so excellent in all respects that the paragraphs 

 of general interest will be here reproduced. 



Abram Stevens Hewitt was born in Haverstraw, N. Y., July 31, 1822. His 

 father, John Hewitt, an English mechanic, came to this country in 1790, to assist 

 in erecting the first steam engine in America, and remained to share the fortunes 

 of the young Republic. His mother belonged to a Huguenot family (the Gar- 

 nier, now the well known Gurnee family) resident in the State of New York. 



At the time of his birth, his father, after acquiring a considerable fortune as a 

 cabinet maker and merchant in New York City, and losing all by a disastrous 

 conflagration, had become a^ farmer upon the Gamier estate ; and in a log-cabin 

 on this tract he was bom. 



Working upon the farm in the summer and attending a New York public 

 school in the winter, he won at the end of his common-school course, as the re- 

 sult of a severe competitive examination, one of the two free scholarships then 

 offered annually by Columbia College, and was thus enabled to go through a 

 college course, supporting himself by extra labor as a private tutor, so that he 

 could afterwards say with just pride, " Not one dollar of burden did my educa- 

 tion impose upon my parents, who anxious as they might be to give me an edu- 

 cation, were too poor to do so." 



In college, as in school, he held from first to last the position of head of his 

 class, and, after graduation, was for some time assistant professor in mathe- 

 matics. During this period he began the study of law ; and in 1845 he was 

 admitted to the bar, after an examination of exceptional severity, which the 

 majority of the candidates failed to pass. 



Meanwhile, however, he had made a brief trip to Europe, together with his 

 friend Edward Cooper, and, shipwrecked on the return voyage, had been, with 

 his companion, rescued after drifting for a day in a frail boat upon the Atlantic. 

 His subsequent statement as to the impression produced by this experience is 

 given in his own words, because it sounds the keynote of his life. 



"I landed at New York in mid-winter, in a borrowed suit of sailor's clothing, 

 and I had three silver dollars in my pocket, my entire worldly wealth. 



' ' I was then twenty-two years old ; and that accident was the turning-point 

 of my life. It taught me, for the first time, that I could stand in the face of 

 death without fear and without flinching. It taught me another thing—that 

 my life, which had been thus miraculously rescued, belonged not to me ; and 

 from that hour I gave it to the work which from that time has been in my 

 thoughts — the welfare of my fellow-citizens." 



