Pratt Institute - Prattonia Yearbook (Brooklyn, NY)

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Co Edward Francis Stevens Iu apprectation of bis un- selfish service and lopal in- terest in the progress of Pratt Justitute, we Dedicate this bolume.

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Tributes to Founder HE following remarks are taken for the most part from addresses made at different times by friends and associates of Mr. Charles Pratt, founder of Pratt Institute. It seems necessary in order for a better appreciation to give a very brief outline of Mr. Pratt’s life. Charles Pratt was born at Watertown, Massachusetts, on October 2, 1830. When only ten years of age, he left home to go to work. He had no money and only a scanty education. For seven years he worked as best he could as a farm helper, a grocery clerk, and a machinist’s helper. By then he had obtained what he wanted—enough money saved to allow him a year at a good school, Wilbraham Academy. After the year of school, he entered the paint and oil trade, which proved to be his life’s business, starting as a clerk first in a Boston paint shop and continuing in this capacity after moving to New York in 1851. A little later he was able, with two other young men, to form the firm Raynolds, DeVoe Pratt, dealers in paints and oils. This partnership lasted until 1867, when Mr. Pratt continued by himself the oil business of the firm. The huge possibilities for financial success resulting from the opening of the Penn- sylvania petroleum fields were just becoming apparent at this time. Mr. Pratt was a pioneer in the refining of crude oil, and his product, Astral Oil, was perhaps the best known and most widely used in those years. His business was amalgamated shortly with the Standard Oil Company, in which larger concern he was an officer until the time of his death in 189]. The supreme event in Mr. Pratt's life was his founding of Pratt Institute in 1887. Several years afterward the late Professor Franklin W. Hooper, of the Brooklyn Institute, in a reminiscent address on Founder's Day, said: “In the establishment of Pratt Institute, Charles Pratt brought to life a broader and deeper idea of the scope and purposes of education. He showed the shallowness of the theory that culture can be gained only from books. He showed that education is a training of the powers of the entire man; that it is as broad as life and is a large part of life. “Those who knew Mr. Pratt personally and intimately thought of him as a man preéminently interested in doing good, a man greater than his works. Great as was his success in amassing wealth, great as was his work in founding the Pratt Institute, Mr. Pratt himself, in his relations to his fellow men, in his home, in his church, and in the community in which he lived, transcended all these.” In his invariably sincere and impressive way, Mr. Charles M. Pratt, eldest son of the Founder and President of the Board of Trustees of the Institute, one Founder's Day expressed the following truths: “Poverty embitters, discourages, and destroys some men, while with others—many others—it stimulates as perhaps nothing so weil could do—their courage and their will power to master the situation. Mr. Pratt was one of the latter. Poverty taught him sturdy self-reliance, developed a tireless industry, and compelled economy and thrift. On the other hand, because of the very limitation and the hardship his own life had had to endure, poverty opened the springs of unselfishness and of service to others.” The Reverend Charles H. Hall, in a sermon delivered in Holy Trinity Church, Brooklyn, the Sunday following Mr. Pratt's death, paid this tribute: “It is a life singularly raised up among us, in which the wisdom of the hour shines out. It was begun in such circumstances that it illustrated all that the workingman can feel and think and claim; continued to wealth which gave it the knowledge of all that besets the rich with temptations to ease and pride and selfishness; and then so poised between humility and business abilities that both rich and poor can appreciate and honor it. It has been seen as then using all its gifts and experiences to bring together all classes, the rich to love it for its simplicity, the poor to respect it for its sound sense. It is a life as truly fitted for this community as was that of Besaleel for his time. Let us keep it before us and improve on it, if we can.” Dr. James MacAlister, at one time President of Drexel Institute, said: “It is as the founder of an institution devoted to the new education that his name has been These quotations were selecied and compiled by the Founder's namesake and grand- son, Charles Pratt. 9