Education: Trustee Stewart

Princeton University is building a new chapel, one of the largest university chapels in the world, modeled in collegiate Gothic after King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. Workmen went to work on it last fortnight. Their wages and the materials and the fee to Architects Cram and Ferguson, will total $1,750,000. This great sum must come, is coming, from Princeton’s alumni and friends. Last week President John Grier Hibben announced that $1,419,000 had come, including $25,000 from a modest, retiring old gentleman who has served Princeton in this way and that longer than any other living man. He is John Aikman Stewart, Columbia ’40.

Born in 1822, Mr. Stewart went into engineering, clerked on New York’s education board, was an insurance actuary and in 1853 founded the U. S. Trust Co. President Lincoln appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Treasuryin 1864. Princeton (then College of New Jersey) secured him as a trustee four years later. In October, 1910, when Woodrow Wilson resigned his presidential chair at Princeton to become Governor of New Jersey, Mr. Stewart as senior trustee was called upon to serve as president pro tempore until the inauguration of Dr. Hibben in January, 1912. Known as Wall Street’s oldest financier (he relinquished the presidency of the U. S. Trust Co. 24 years ago, serving as chairman of the board thereafter) and as Columbia’s oldest living graduate, Mr. Stewart is also Princeton’s oldest official. He has seen the regimes of Presidents Maclean, McCosh, Patton, Wilson, Stewart and Hibben. Well started on his second century of life, he lives in Manhattan in good spirits, good health.