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John Fox Slater

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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JOHN FOX SLATER (1815-1884), American philanthropist, son of John Slater (Samuel Slater's brother and partner), was. born in Slatersville, Rhode Island, on the 4th of March 1815. He was educated in academies at Plainfield, Connecticut, and Wrentham and Wilbraham, Massachusetts. At seventeen he entered his father's woollen mill in Hopeville, Conn., of which he took charge in 1836. This and other mills he owned in partnership with his brother, William S. Slater, until 1873, when his. brother took over the Slatersville Mills and he assumed sole ownership of the mills at Jewett City, Conn. In 1842 he removed from Jewett City to Norwich; there he helped to endow the Norwich Free Academy, to which his son presented the Slater Memorial Hall; and there he died on the 7th of May 1884. In 1882 he had made over to a board of ten trustees, incorporated in New York state, $1,000,000 for "the uplifting of the lately emancipated population of the Southern states, and their posterity, by conferring on them the benefits of Christian education." Among the original trustees of the Slater Fund were Rutherford B. Hayes, Morrison R. Waite, William E. Dodge, Phillips Brooks, Daniel C. Gilman, Morris K. Jesup and the donor's son, William A. Slater; and among members chosen later were Melville W. Fuller, William E. Dodge, Jr., Henry C. Potter, Cleveland H. Dodge and Seth Low. In 1909 by careful investment the fund had increased, in spite of expenditures, to more than $1,50o,000. The fund has been of great value in aiding industrial schools in the South, its largest beneficiaries being the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute of Hampton, Virginia, the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute of Tuskegee, Alabama, Spelman Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia, Claflin University in Orangeburg, S.C., and Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee. At Winston-Salem, N. C., is the Slater State Normal and Industrial School, founded in 1892 and named after the founder of the fund. Other state normal schools for negroes have received assistance from the fund; and in some cases it has contributed directly to the school boards of Southern cities.