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Updated: June 17, 2025
Being thus a large holder of the stock of the bank, the charter having expired, and its affairs being in liquidation, he bought out the entire concern; and, merely changing the name to Girard's Bank, continued it in being as a private institution, in the same building, with the same coin in its vaults, the same bank-notes, the same cashier and clerks.
This is the testimony of Mr. Henry W. Arey, the distinguished secretary of Girard College, in whose keeping are the papers of the subject of this memoir, and it must be confessed that his view of Girard's character is sustained by the following incidents, the narration of which I have passed over until now, in order that the history of his commercial career might not be interrupted: In the summer of 1793 the yellow fever broke out with fearful violence in Philadelphia.
Unlike Booth, Forrest came from no family of actors, nor inherited a name famous in the annals of the stage. He was born in Philadelphia in 1806, his father being a Scotchman, employed in Stephen Girard's bank, and making just enough money to keep his family of six children from actual want.
In this game a large company of eminent merchants played; Girard and Astor were peers in the playing and got away with the greater share of the stakes. Before describing Girard's career, it is well to cast a retrospective fleeting glance into conditions following the Revolution.
He volunteered to act as manager of the hospital at Bush Hill and with the assistance of Peter Helm he cleansed the place and systemized the work. On his death in 1831, Girard's estate, the greatest private fortune in America, was valued at about seven and a half million dollars, and his philanthropy was again shown in his disposition of it.
"It is the house of LE BON DIEU. Can we build it in hate?" "POLISSON! You make an excuse. Then come to Girard's, and fight there." Again Prosper held in for a moment, and spoke three words: "No! Not now." "Not now? But when, you heart of a hare? Will you sneak out of it until you turn gray and die? When will you fight, little musk-rat?" "When I have forgotten. When I am no more your friend."
Girard's greatest stroke came from the insurrection of the San Domingo negroes against the French several years later. He had two vessels lying in the harbor of one of the island ports. At the first mutterings of danger, a number of planters took their valuables on board one of these ships and scurried back to get the remainder.
His marble statue, which adorns the entrance to the principal building, if it could speak, might say to us, "Living, you could not understand nor love me; dead, I compel at least your respect." Indeed, he used to say, when questioned as to his career, "Wait till I am dead; my deeds will show what I was." Girard's recollections of his childhood were tinged with bitterness.
To the most passionate entreaties of failing merchants for a loan to help them over a crisis, he was inflexibly deaf. They thought it meanness. But we can safely infer from Girard's letters and conversation that he thought it an injury to the community to avert from a man of business the consequences of extravagance and folly, which, in his view, were the sole causes of failure.
This statue has no special setting and is merely one of a dozen decorative objects that surround the square. That particular clause in Girard's will which provided that no clergyman, preacher or priest should ever be allowed to act as trustee for the school, or ever be allowed to enter the school, is still respected, outwardly at least. The gatekeeper challenges you thus: "Are you a clergyman?"
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