John Harvard

John Harvard was a Puritan minister from Southwark, near London, who came to Massachusetts in 1637 and died of tuberculosis the next year, at about thirty. On his deathbed he left half his money, about 780 pounds, and his library of some 400 books to the colony's new college, which had been founded two years before. The grateful colony named the college after him.

Almost nothing of him survives. A fire in 1764 destroyed 4,500 of the college library's 5,000 books, and nobody knows what he looked like, so when Daniel Chester French made the statue in Harvard Yard in 1884 he used a student, Sherman Hoar, as the model. Visitors rub the toe of the left shoe for luck and it shines gold; the guide on our Harvard walk explains why you may prefer not to.