Edward Ayer

Edward Everett Ayer (November 16, 1841 – May 3, 1927) was an American business magnate, best remembered for the endowments of his substantial collections of books and original manuscripts from Native American and colonial-era history and ethnology, which were donated to the Newberry Library and Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Ayer had over time built an immense fortune out of supplying timber to the 19th century’s fast-growing railroad industry. However, it was a chance encounter in his youth with a book that inspired Ayer's lifelong investments of time and money that resulted one of the largest collections of historical and American literature accumulated by the early 20th century. That book was William H. Prescott’s famous History of the Conquest of Mexico, which Ayer first read in a small library attached to a silver mine south of Tucson Ayer had been guarding as part of his military service. By his own account, he was indelibly marked by what he read and it became the foundation for his insatiable interest in Indian Americana literature.

Until 1836, the Ayer family had remained in Massachusetts since arriving from England two hundred years earlier. Like the colonizers who first came to the New World, Edward's father Elbridge Gerry Ayer was drawn to the adventure and economic possibilities on the frontier, and moved to Southport (modern-day Kenosha, Wisconsin) where Edward was born in 1841. His older sister Mary was possibly “the first white child born” there. A military road established by Congress turned Southport into an increasingly significant trade route. Ayer’s father opened a general store, contracted a blacksmith, and even dabbled in grain brokering. He sold his enterprise to buy land five miles south where a train station was to be built. There he had the fortune to participate in the planning of the town of Harvard, Illinois. His efforts led to limited railroad construction contracts. Young Edward was educated at the first school built in Harvard, where he recalls "books were very scarce...I virtually never saw any but the Bible and Josephus' works."

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