In the spring of 1873, the richest man in America was seventy-eight years old and thinking about his legacy.
Cornelius Vanderbilt — the “Commodore” — had built his fortune in steamships and railroads. He controlled the New York Central. He was worth over $100 million, a sum so large in 1873 dollars that it had no meaningful comparison. He was also deeply aware that history remembers builders, not hoarders, and he had built nothing except a transportation empire that would be inherited by his children and dismantled by his grandchildren.
He was considering a monument. The details vary depending on the source, but the general shape of the idea was a colossal statue of George Washington — something grand and permanent, erected in New York, a patriotic gesture from a man whose patriotism had always expressed itself through commerce rather than sentiment. It would be expensive. It would be visible. It would be exactly the kind of thing that a man with more money than purpose commissions in the last years of his life.
Then a Methodist bishop came to stay in his house, and the statue was never built.
Holland Nimmons McTyeire was not from Nashville originally — he was born in South Carolina, educated at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, and had spent most of his ministerial career in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. He had edited the Nashville Christian Advocate, the flagship newspaper of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, until Union forces took the city in 1862 and he fled to Alabama. After the war, he was elected bishop in 1866 and became one of the most powerful figures in Southern Methodism.
He was also, through the kinds of connections that only Southern families maintain, related by marriage to the Commodore’s second wife.
In 1856, Cornelius Vanderbilt — then sixty-two, recently widowed — had married Frank Armstrong Crawford, a young woman from Mobile, Alabama. Frank Crawford was a cousin of Amelia Townsend, who was the wife of Holland McTyeire. This made McTyeire and Vanderbilt in-laws of a sort — the kind of tenuous family connection that means nothing in most contexts and everything in the one that matters.
In early 1873, McTyeire traveled to New York for medical treatment. Frank Crawford Vanderbilt invited him to convalesce at the Vanderbilt mansion. For several weeks, the bishop — a Southerner, a Methodist, a man who had spent the war on the losing side and the decade since watching the South struggle to rebuild — lived under the same roof as the man who had more money than anyone in the Western Hemisphere.
McTyeire saw his opportunity and took it.
The Methodist Church had chartered an institution called Central University in Nashville in 1872. It existed on paper and nowhere else. There was no campus, no endowment, no faculty, and no realistic prospect of any of these things materializing. Southern institutions were broke. The war had destroyed the region’s wealth, and what money existed was going to railroads and cotton, not education. Central University was a charter looking for a patron.
McTyeire made the case to Vanderbilt over days and weeks of conversation in the mansion. The South needed a university — a real one, not a seminary with ambitions, but an institution that could stand alongside the Northern schools that had been educating the country’s leadership for two centuries. Nashville was the right city: centrally located, a railroad hub, the capital of a border state that had been torn apart by the war. A university there would, as McTyeire framed it, “strengthen the ties which should exist between all sections of our common country.”
This was the argument that moved the Commodore: not charity, but reconciliation. Vanderbilt had been a Unionist during the war. He had no sentimental attachment to the South. But he understood — with the instinct of a man who had built a railroad network — that a country divided was a country that couldn’t do business. A university in Nashville was an investment in national cohesion. It was also, not incidentally, a monument more enduring than any statue.
The George Washington statue was quietly forgotten.
On March 17, 1873, Cornelius Vanderbilt wrote to McTyeire and committed $500,000 to the project — the largest single gift to a university that had ever been made in the South. He would eventually double it to $1 million. His conditions were specific: McTyeire would serve as president of the Board of Trust for life, with absolute authority over the university’s development. The Commodore trusted the bishop’s judgment more than he trusted a committee’s.
The trustees renamed the school. Central University became Vanderbilt University. Cornelius Vanderbilt had not asked for this. McTyeire and the board did it as a gesture of gratitude, and the Commodore — a man not known for false modesty — did not object.
McTyeire chose the site himself: seventy-four acres of farmland just west of downtown Nashville, a former cornfield with good drainage and room to grow. He supervised the construction of the main building — a Victorian Gothic structure that would later be renamed Kirkland Hall — and personally planted many of the trees that still stand on the campus today. He selected the first chancellor, Landon Garland, a former professor at the University of Mississippi.
On October 3, 1875, Vanderbilt University opened its doors. Three hundred and seven students enrolled. There were no dormitories — the leadership considered them “injurious to both morals and manners” — so students boarded with Nashville families. The university had four departments: academic, biblical, law, and medical. The medical school had actually started a year earlier, in 1874, through an arrangement with the existing University of Nashville, making Vanderbilt’s first graduate a medical student named Henry William Morgan who received his degree seven months before the campus officially opened.
Cornelius Vanderbilt never visited. He died on January 4, 1877, at eighty-two, having given Nashville a university he never saw. His total gifts to the institution reached $1 million — roughly $27 million in today’s money, and the seed from which grew an endowment that now exceeds $10 billion.
McTyeire ran the Board of Trust until his death in 1889. He is buried on the Vanderbilt campus. His role in the university’s creation is one of the great acts of persuasion in the history of American philanthropy: a man with no money convinced a man with all the money to spend it on a city the rich man had never visited, for a purpose the rich man had never considered, instead of building a statue that nobody would have remembered.
The university that resulted has produced twenty-nine Rhodes Scholars, seven Nobel laureates, two vice presidents, and a medical center that is the largest private employer in Middle Tennessee. It exists because a bishop got sick at the right time, had the right cousin, and understood that the correct response to a man considering a monument to George Washington was not to praise the idea but to quietly replace it with a better one.
Frank Crawford Vanderbilt — the Alabama woman whose marriage to the Commodore made the whole thing possible — outlived her husband by fifty-eight years. She died in 1935 at the age of ninety-five. She never received a building.
Nashville got a university because a Methodist bishop was a better salesman than anyone in New York. That’s the whole story, really. The rest is endowment.
Photo: Giers / Wikimedia Commons