He was 19 when he left home to seek his fortune. He set out on foot, walking 33 miles to Syracuse from the family home in DeRuyter, nine dollars in his pocket and some clothes bundled in a handkerchief.
In Syracuse, he found work as a carpenter, but he didn’t stay long; within a week he’d been robbed twice. He moved on to Homer, working in a shop that made wool-carding machinery, supplementing his third-grade education by studying books on mechanics in his spare time.
His father was a farmer who owned a modest pottery works and traveled throughout Upstate New York selling his wares; he likely told his son about the little boomtown at the southern tip of Cayuga Lake. Over the previous two decades, Ithaca had grown into a bustling community of 2,000 people.
On a mid-April day in 1828 a young Ezra walked down the hill into town, betting that it was the sort of place where a man unafraid of hard work and hard times could make a name for himself.
That name, of course, is everywhere now: on sweatshirts and buildings, diplomas and buses, a dairy bar and a particle accelerator. It’s on a tech campus on NYC’s Roosevelt Island, a medical college in Qatar, a marine research station off the coast of Maine.
Read the rest of this biography of Ezra Cornell, including insight from A&S alumna University Archivist Emerita Elaine Deutsch Engst, MA ’72, on the Cornellians website.
