Word: girard
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...many of his contemporaries in early 19th Century Philadelphia, Stephen Girard was an old codger in an unfashionable full-skirted coat and pigtail who frequently jostled his way to High Street Market to sell baskets of eggs and vegetables from his farm in Passyunk Township, three miles southwest of the city. Solid burghers, however, recognized him as the man who paid one-tenth of Philadelphia's real estate taxes, who had in 1814 subscribed to 95% of the U. S. Government's unpopular $5,000,000 war loan. Clergymen were painfully aware that he read the French rationalists...
Most of Philadelphia went to his big funeral. Most of the U. S. heard about his will. In it eccentric Stephen Girard, whose only child died in infancy, set aside some $6,000,000, the bulk of his fortune, for a college for "poor male white orphan children," prescribed that "no ecclesiastic, missionary, or minister of any sect whatsoever, shall ever hold or exercise any station or duty whatever in the said College; nor shall any such person ever be admitted for any purpose, or as a visitor." When Stephen Girard's French kin tried to break the will...
Meanwhile masons had been busy with the first College building, a vast Greek temple of gleaming white marble for which the Founder had left precise specifications. In 1848 Girard opened its first class of 100 fatherless boys. Within the building, which a hostile press called "The Icy Ghost of Two Million Dollars," a hardboiled staff shaved the orphans' heads, scrubbed their necks, put them through a cheerless routine of study and frequent canings...
...news, the division commander, General Réveilhac, ordered his artillery to shell the 2 ist's trenches. He was frustrated by the artillery commander, who refused to obey without a written order. Thereupon General Réveilhac ordered the 21st to the rear, Corporals Maupas, Girard, Lefoulon and Lechat shot by a firing squad, buried under shameful black crosses...
...started out," said Champion Girard, "the gardener and I, and in no time at all I found three five-leaf plants. I had them dug up and presented them to the home. It was the day Will Rogers was laid to rest, and I suggested they call them the Will Rogers clovers. The eight-leaf clover I have placed between slides of glass. I plan to have the whole thing mounted in gold and displayed at Franklin Institute if they will claim...