George V. N. Baldwin

George Van Nest Baldwin, for thirty-eight years a frequenter of our society, and for a period of ten years earlier a lawyer at our Bar, was born in New York of colonial Dutch ancestry, educated at Rutgers College and the Columbia Law School, and spent a life of the highest usefulness among the best elements of this community. He knew books and pictures, he understood the management of the many estates entrusted to his care, he appreciated the finer sides of companionship and conversation; he was the spirit incarnate of genial sympathy combined with stalwart manhood. To him, and many associate Centurions, the University Club owes its reincarnation toward the close of our residence in Fifteenth Street, and he was one of its highest officials. Distinction to him was the performance of the duties imposed upon him; with malice for no one, but with sturdy insistence on principle as he saw it; and above all it was the life of a friend among ennobling associations. Public service he gave, without ostentation, in no less than fifteen of our eleemosynary, social, and educational institutions, but in all he came and went with a quiet spirit, catching with zest the passing tendency, giving and receiving in full measure the kindness which true friendship and a modest soul evoke in sociability with living men engaged in the world’s best work.

William Milligan Sloane
1909 Century Association Yearbook