Stanford, Amasa Leland

• Author: Jeffrey Lehman, Shirelle Phelps

Page 301

Amasa Leland Stanford, known as Leland Stanford, along with partners Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Collis P. Huntington (the Big Four), founded the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific Rail Roads, and laid the tracks that would eventually link a nation. In the course of building the first transcontinental railroad, Stanford dominated California business, politics, and social life for almost fifty years.

Stanford was born on March 9, 1824, in Watervliet, New York. He was one of eight children born to Josiah Stanford and Elizabeth Phillips Stanford. His father was a prominent farmer and a prosperous merchant, who supplied building materials for the town's public works projects. Growing up, Stanford worked on the family farm and helped his father with local road and bridge construction. His boyhood work on the local transportation infrastructure sparked an interest that would fuel his life's work.

"A MAN WILL NEVER CONSTRUCT ANYTHING HE CANNOT IMAGINE."

?LELANDM STANFORD

Stanford's early education included attendance at the local public school and some home schooling. At eighteen, he enrolled at the Clinton Liberal Institute, in Clinton, New York. He completed his education at New York's Cazenovia Seminary. At twenty-one, he began clerking with the law firm of Wheaton, Doolittle, and Hadley, in Albany, New York. Three years later, in 1845, Stanford was admitted to the bar.

Page 302

Leland Stanford.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Like many young men of his era, Stanford saw tremendous opportunity for those who moved west. In 1848 he settled in Port Washington, Wisconsin, to establish a law practice. While Stanford was establishing his professional career in Wisconsin, several of his brothers headed to California, eager to apply their skills as merchants in its mining camps and growing towns.

In the spring of 1852, Stanford sent his wife, Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford, to stay with her family in Albany, and he followed his brothers to the Pacific Coast. By all accounts, Stanford arrived in California with little or no money. His brothers provided him with a stock of miners' supplies and set him up as a merchant in a mining town. His business there was very successful. Popular with the miners and trained in the law, Stanford was often called upon to mediate claim disputes and other problems.

Convinced that his future was in California, Stanford persuaded his wife to join him there. In 1856 they...