John William Sterling was a philanthropist, corporate attorney, and major benefactor to Yale University.
John William Sterling was born in Stratford, Connecticut. He graduated from Yale University with a BA in 1864 and was admitted to the bar three years later. He obtained an MA degree in 1874 and an LL.D. from Columbia Law School in 1893. He became a corporate lawyer in New York, and helped found the law firm of Shearman & Sterling in 1873.
Around 1870, Sterling met James Orville Bloss (1847-1918), his 'intimate friend' for the next fifty years. Historian Jonathan Ned Katz suggests that theirs was also a sexual relationship.
As a lawyer, Sterling represented Jay Gould, James Fisk, the National City Bank of New York, and Standard Oil. Sterling's partner Thomas G Shearman defended Reverend Henry Ward Beecher in his adultery trial.
On his death in 1918 at Estevan Lodge in Quebec Canada, Sterling left $18 million to Yale, at the time the largest non-founding contribution made by an individual to a private university - equivalent to about $180 million in 2003. A portion of this was used to fund the Sterling Professorships, and other portions were used to build the Sterling Memorial Library, Sterling Law Buildings, Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, Sterling Chemistry Laboratory, the School of Medicine, Trumbull College, and the Hall of Graduate Studies.
Sterling’s will provided that his unmarried sister and unmarried friend Bloss could one day share his mausoleum. Sterling’s married sister was left, after death, to find her own resting place. Sterling thereby constructed his monument as a shrine to singleness, even to marriage resistors.
The idea of Sterling as unromantic and businesslike is belied by a few lines of a poem by Charles Algernon Swinburne that Sterling clipped from the New York Times in 1883 and pasted on the very last page of his commonplace book:
Once more I give my body and soul to thee,Sterling is entombed at Woodlawn Cemetery.
Who hast my soul for ever: cliff and sand
Recede, and heart to heart once more are we.
Picture: John William Sterling [left] with roommate at Yale in 1863.