Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford (August 25, 1828 – February 28, 1905) was an American philanthropist and co-founder in 1885 of Stanford University (opened 1891) with her husband Leland Stanford, in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who died of typhoid fever in 1884 at age 15.
After her husband's death in 1893, Jane Stanford funded and operated the university almost single-handedly until her unsolved murder by strychnine poisoning in 1905.
Jane Stanford was the eighth First Lady of California. Her husband served as governor from 10 January 1862 to 10 December 1863.
Born Jane Elizabeth Lathrop in Albany, New York, she was the daughter of shopkeeper Dyer Lathrop and Jane Anne (Shields) Lathrop. Jane attended The Albany Academy for Girls, the longest-running girls' day school in the country. She was the second of six siblings:
Daniel Shields Lathrop (1825–1883)
Jane Elizabeth Lathrop (8/25/1828-2/28/1905)
Anna Maria Lathrop (9/3/1832 – 8/3/1892) (married David Hewes)
Henry Clay Lathrop (5/20/1844 – 4/3/1899)
Charles Gardner Lathrop (5/11/1849 – 5/24/1914)
Lathrop married Leland Stanford on September 30, 1850.
The Stanfords lived in Port Washington, Wisconsin until 1852, when Leland Stanford's law library and other property were lost to fire; they then returned to Albany, New York. Leland Stanford went to California to join his brothers in mercantile businesses related to the California Gold Rush, and Jane remained in Albany with her family. He returned in 1855, and the following year, they moved to San Francisco, where he engaged in mercantile pursuits on a large scale. Leland Stanford was a co-founder of the Central Pacific Railroad and served as its president from 1861 until his death in 1893. Leland was president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, served as governor of California from 1862 to 1863, and was a United States senator from California from 1885 until his death in 1893.
On May 14, 1868, Jane Stanford gave birth to a son, Leland Stanford, Jr., at age 39. He died at age 15 on March 13, 1884, of typhoid fever while the family was in Florence, Italy.
Following their son's death, Jane and Leland Stanford sought ways to memorialize him. Before they left Europe in April 1884, with his remains, they changed their wills to give everything to a proposed institution at Palo Alto. In November 1885, they created foundational plans for the Leland Stanford Junior University, which opened on October 1, 1891. After her husband's death on June 21, 1893, Jane Stanford effectively took control of the university. The university struggled financially in this period and the trustees advocated a temporary closure of the university until tax and legal issues could be resolved. From 1893 to 1898, she collected $10,000 per month from the university, as its co-founder. The estate left probate in 1898. As the remaining founder, she wielded a great deal of legal control over the university until her death.
It was at Jane Stanford's direction that Stanford University gained an early focus on the arts. She also advocated for the admission of women; the university had been co-educational since its founding. She took a strong position on the issue of academic freedom when Stanford sought and ultimately succeeded in having Stanford University economist Edward A. Ross fired. Ross had made speeches favoring the Democrat William Jennings Bryan, had collectivist economic teachings, favored racism against Chinese American "coolies", and outlined eugenics policies directed against Chinese people and other racial groups.
Jane Stanford traveled to London in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, in hopes of selling her rubies and other jewels to raise funds for the university, but was disappointed in the prices offered and returned home with most of her jewelry intact. In 1905, Stanford directed the university trustees to sell her jewels after her death and use the funds as a permanent endowment "to be used exclusively for the purchase of books and other publications". The board of trustees confirmed that arrangement, and the Jewel Fund continues to add to the university's library collections. The endowment, originally $500,000, is now worth about $20 million. Items purchased through the Jewel Fund display a distinctive bookplate that depicts a romanticized Jane Stanford offering her jewels to Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. Since 2007, benefactors who provide endowments for library acquisitions are referred to as members of the Jewel Society.
On February 28, 1905, Stanford died in Hawaii, where she had traveled after a failed poisoning attempt in San Francisco. The verdict in Hawaii was that Stanford had died of strychnine poisoning. However, David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford, immediately went to Hawaii, where he suppressed the report of poisoning and insisted that she had died of natural causes. Jordan's coverup was accepted as the truth for decades.
Earlier, on January 14, 1905, at her Nob Hill mansion in San Francisco, Stanford consumed mineral water that tasted bitter. She quickly forced herself to vomit the water with prompting from and assistance by her maid, and when both the maid and her secretary agreed that the bottled water tasted strange, she sent it to a pharmacy to be analyzed. The findings, returned a few weeks later, showed that the water had been poisoned with a lethal dose of strychnine. Stanford moved out of her mansion and vowed never to return. Elizabeth Richmond, the maid, fell under suspicion and was dismissed. (Richmond had worked in Britain and had reportedly regaled Stanford's domestic staff with tales of English aristocrats being poisoned by their servants.)
The Harry Morse Detective and Patrol Agency was retained for a discreet investigation of the incident. Its detectives put Richmond under surveillance and scoured records of Bay Area pharmacies for possibly-suspicious purchases of strychnine but found none. The agency learned that the mansion was a hothouse of petty staff jealousies, graft, and intrigue, but it could not come up with evidence pointing to a culprit or a motive for an attempted murder. Depressed by the conviction that an unknown party had tried to kill her and suffering from a cold, Stanford soon decided to sail to Hawaii, with plans to continue on to Japan. The Stanford party left San Francisco for Honolulu on February 15, 1905.