James W. Ellsworth

In a different field from that which Stoeckel cultivated, James William Ellsworth presented a very similar picture of what the well-to-do American can contribute, through the wise use of his private fortune, to the progress of his country in culture and intelligence. During the whole of a busy industrial career, Ellsworth at no moment failed to have in his hands the guiding responsibility to some public enterprise wholly apart from his private interests. In its earliest days he was an active promoter of the park and boulevard system of Chicago; he was organizer and financial supporter of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893; he always led the movement for better schools and model towns. He personally defrayed the cost of Amundsen’s aerial flight from Norway to the Arctic in 1925; on which occasion his son [Lincoln Ellsworth], also a fellow-Centurion, piloted one of the planes.

Nor was Ellsworth only a utilitarian reformer. As a bibliophile his collection of books and manuscripts, including a Gutenberg Bible of 1455, was one of this country’s rare collections. He had gathered probably the largest collection of Inness landscapes in any private gallery. His Chinese porcelains, Oriental rugs, and ancient Greek statuettes and tapestries, and his remarkable collection of clocks, marked the scope of his artistic taste, which its most appropriate expression in his purchase and restoration, twenty years ago, of the famous Villa Palmieri at Florence, where he lived for part of the year in all his later life.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1926 Century Association Yearbook