21 Facts About Leland Stanford

1. Leland Stanford was buried in the family mausoleum on the Stanford campus.

2. Leland Stanford was a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows in California.

3. Leland Stanford was an active freemason from 1850 to 1855, joining the Prometheus Lodge No 17 in Port Washington, Wisconsin.

4. Leland Stanford had ideas of employee ownership for more than thirty years before giving them expression in his plans for Stanford University, proposals as a Senator, and in interviews with the news media.

5. Leland Stanford served for four years as chairman of the US Senate Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds, and served on the Naval Committee.

6. Leland Stanford was the eighth Governor of California, serving from January 1862 to December 1863, and the first Republican governor.

7. Leland Stanford was elected governor in a second campaign in 1861.

8. Leland Stanford was defeated in his 1857 bid for California state treasurer, and his 1859 bid for the office of governor of California.

9. Leland Stanford was chosen as a delegate to the Republican Party convention which selected US presidential electors in both 1856 and 1860.

10. Leland Stanford was the founder of the insurance company Pacific Life.

11. Leland Stanford was interested in horses and owned the Gridley tract of 17,800 acres in Butte County.

12. Leland Stanford was president of the Southern Pacific Company from 1885 until 1890 when he was forced out of that post by Collis Huntington.

13. Leland Stanford moved with his family from Sacramento to San Francisco in 1874, where he assumed presidency of the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company, the steamship line to Japan and China associated with the Central Pacific.

14. Leland Stanford was even given the honor of driving the final spike.

15. Leland Stanford was elected president of the Southern Pacific, a post he held until 1890 when he was ousted by Collis Huntington.

16. Leland Stanford was a director of Wells Fargo and Company from 1870 to January 1884.

17. Leland Stanford served one term, then limited to two years.

18. Leland Stanford was nominated again in 1861 and won the election.

19. Leland Stanford attended the common school until 1836 and was tutored at home until 1839.

20. Leland Stanford was one of eight children of Josiah and Elizabeth Phillips Stanford.

21. Leland Stanford was born in 1824 in what was then Watervliet, New York.