![]() ![]() View Primary Sources The Sugar Trade of the Americas These records reveal that Pyne’s payments for something as ordinary as a fan stemmed directly from an estate whose earliest foundations lay not simply in the banking world of New York, but in the daily work of carrying the produce of the region’s largest sugar plantations to the markets of the world.Įxamples of the ubiquity of the Pyne name, ranging from the webpage of the Department of Classics, to the honors bestowed upon Sonia Sotomayor, a recipient of the 1976 Pyne Prize. Ī return to the leather-bound account book in which Pyne or his clerk inscribed the payments for the library fans that July of 1900, however, reveals the beginnings of a more complicated story-one that scholars have only recently begun to excavate. In history books that mention Pyne’s contributions, his fortune is most often explained with broad references to either his success as a commercial lawyer in New York or his inheritance of a large estate from his grandfather, Moses Taylor, usually described in his capacity as a successful merchant and founding president of a New York bank. ĭespite its prominent place in the geography of campus, the complex roots of Pyne’s financial support to Princeton have remained largely out of view. Such was the depth of the lawyer’s broad support for Princeton that on the day of his funeral in 1921, the faculty suspended classes, lowered the flags to half-mast, and dedicated a tower on campus to “Princeton’s Most Loyal Son.” Today, the Pyne family name graces not only some of the most iconic buildings on campus, but the resumes of some of its most celebrated graduates who have received the annual Pyne Prize. Group portrait of the British Educational Mission, including Princeton alumnus and trustee Moses Taylor Pyne (front row, far left). During his tenure as trustee, Pyne’s financial contributions subsidized not only the new library, but also the construction of two undergraduate dormitories on Nassau Street, a slew of new faculty and graduate housing, and endowments for initiatives ranging from a history seminar to a professorship. ![]() Indeed, by that summer of 1900, Pyne’s support for the new library stacks adjacent to Chancellor Greene had accrued to a sum that would alone be worth nearly fourteen million dollars today. Since joining the Board of Trustees sixteen years earlier, the lawyer had begun contributing anonymous donations with such frequency that years later, his first obituary writers dared not even venture an estimate. The payment of thirty-seven dollars that offered relief to the students was by far one of the smallest contributions that Moses Taylor Pyne made to his beloved alma mater. When the heat of the first summer of the twentieth century settled over campus, a forty-five-year-old New York lawyer drafted a check for the ceiling fans that would soon turn overhead in the new wing of the Chancellor Green library.
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