A gold-rush merchant helped drive the Central Pacific
Amasa Leland Stanford (1824–1893)—attorney, industrialist, philanthropist, Republican politician—grew rich as a California merchant after 1852, then as a Central Pacific Railroad executive and California's eighth governor. He drove the ceremonial last spike of the first transcontinental line and later endowed a university in his son's name.
Leland Stanford was born on 9 March 1824 in Watervliet, New York, one of eight children of a well-off farmer, and was schooled locally and then tutored at home. Admitted to the bar in 1848, he practised law in Port Washington, Wisconsin, until a fire destroyed his prized law library in 1852. He then followed his five brothers to the California gold rush, keeping a general store for miners at Michigan Bluff in Placer County and later running a wholesale house.
Settled in Sacramento from 1856, he became one of the Big Four merchants, with Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Collis P. Huntington, who backed the engineer Theodore Judah's plan for the Central Pacific Railroad; they incorporated it on 28 June 1861 with Stanford as president. Its first locomotive bore his name and survives in the California State Railroad Museum. On 10 May 1869 at Promontory, Utah, where the line met the Union Pacific, he drove the final spike. He later led the Southern Pacific until Huntington forced him out in 1890.
Elected governor in 1861 after a failed run in 1859, he became California's first Republican governor and reportedly rowed a boat to his inauguration during the Great Flood of 1862. In his single two-year term he halved the state debt, backed forest conservation, and founded the first state normal school, forerunner of San Jose State University, yet he called for curbing Chinese immigration while his railroad imported Chinese labourers. He sat in the U.S. Senate from 1885 until his death on 21 June 1893.
He helped found the Pacific Union Express Company, merged with Wells Fargo in 1870, whose board he joined. His Great Vina Ranch held the world's largest vineyard, and on his Palo Alto Stock Farm he bred trotters; in 1872 he hired Eadweard Muybridge to photograph horses in motion. After their only child died of typhoid in Florence in 1884, aged 15, he and his wife Jane founded Leland Stanford Junior University in his memory.
Source: Leland Stanford
