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Anthony Joseph Drexel

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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ANTHONY JOSEPH DREXEL (1826-1893), American banker, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the 13th of September 1826. He was the son of Francis M. Drexel (1792-1863), a native of Austrian Tirol, who emigrated to America in 1817, and, after some years spent as a portrait-painter, became a banker and the founder of the house of Drexel & Company. Anthony, who entered his father's counting-house in 1839, eventually, with his brothers Francis and Joseph, succeeded to the control of the business, and organized the banking houses of Drexel, Morgan & Company, New York, of which his brother Joseph W. (1833-1888) was long the resident head, and of Drexel, Harjes & Company, Paris. In 1864 he joined his friend George W. Childs in the purchase of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and with him in 1892 founded the Printers' Home for union men at Colorado Springs. In 1891 he founded, and endowed with $2,000,000, the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry in Philadelphia, the buildings for which he constructed at a cost of $750,000. This institution provides technical instruction for both night and day classes and public lecture courses, and has a good museum and a library of 35,000 volumes. Drexel died at Carlsbad, Germany, on the 30th of June 1893.