Alexander Smith Cochran

Alexander Smith Cochran (February 28, 1874 – June 20, 1929 ) was a manufacturer, sportsman and philanthropist from Yonkers, New York.

He was born on February 28, 1874 to William Francis Cochran and Eva Smith. His grandfather was Alexander Smith, founder of the Alexander Smith Carpet Company.

Cochran inherited his money from his parents and his maternal uncle Warren B. Smith who left Cochran the bulk of an estate estimated to be worth $40 million in 1902. Cochran was the inheritor and principal owner of Alexander Smith & Sons Carpet mills of Yonkers, which by 1929 was the largest carpet manufacturer in the world.

Cochran's properties included Glen Eyrie, in Colorado Springs.

Cochran graduated from Yale University in 1896; in 1911, he founded, with aid from William Lyon Phelps, the university's Elizabethan Club. Cochran bought the clubhouse on College Street, provided the club with an endowment of $100,000 and donated a substantial collection of rare Elizabethan and Jacobean books. These include the four folios of Shakespeare, the 40 quartos acquired from the Huth Collection, the finest of the four known copies of "Venus and Adonis," and the unique copy of The Quenes Maiesties Passage, describing Queen Elizabeth I's first progress the day before her coronation. Cochran, who maintained contact with the club, occasionally made up shortfalls in the operating costs to prevent a member fee from being instituted. Yale's Sterling Memorial Library has exhibited papers and other material highlighting Cochran's philanthropy. The books are gifted to Yale students rather than Yale University, he is noted to have said, regarding the establishment and gifts to the Elizabethan Club.

Cochran was inspired to collect rare first edition books by Phelps. Cochran donated an endowment and his collection of illuminated manuscripts of Persian poetry to the Department of Islamic Art of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1913. In 1907, he accompanied his friend the scholar Abraham Valentine Williams Jackson to Iran. This may have inspired Cochran's collecting; Jackson published a scholarly catalogue on these works in 1913.

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