[3] Despite little formal education and struggles with poverty after his family lost their farm, Horace White became a businessman and wealthy merchant.

[8] In his autobiography, he recalled that he had felt that his time at Geneva was "wasted" by being at the small Episcopalian school instead of at "one of the larger New England universities".

At Yale, White was a classmate of Daniel Coit Gilman, who later served as the first president of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

[4] Other members of White's graduating year included Edmund Clarence Stedman, the poet and essayist; Wayne MacVeagh, Attorney General of the United States and U.S.

After he returned the United States, White enrolled at Yale to earn a MA and be inducted into Phi Beta Kappa in 1856.

[15] In October 1858, White accepted a position as a professor of History and English literature at the University of Michigan, where he remained on faculty until 1863.

[16] White made his lasting mark on the grounds of the university by enrolling students to plant elms along the walkways on The Diag.

[19] Around then, the senators were called on to decide how best to use the higher education funding provided by the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act, which allocated timberland in the Midwest, which states could sell as they saw fit.

[19] On February 7, 1865, White introduced a bill "to establish the Cornell University" and, on April 27, 1865, after months of debate, Governor Reuben E. Fenton signed into law the bill endowing Cornell University as the state's land-grant institution.In 1865, White also authored "...The Negro's Right to Citizenship - a very detailed legal, ethical and logical argument for citizenship for the Negro."

A staunch abolitionist, White was also the author of "abolition of Slavery the Right of Government under the War Powers Act" as well as several other legal arguments in favor of the Negro.

Over the next 30 years, he refined his analysis, expanding his case studies to include nearly every field of science over the entire history of Christianity but also narrowing his target from "religion" through "ecclesiasticism" to "dogmatic theology."

[30] While at Cornell, in 1871, he took leave to serve as a Commissioner to Santo Domingo, along with Benjamin Wade and Samuel Howe, at the request of President Ulysses Grant to determine the feasibility of an American annexation of the Dominican Republic.

[34] In 1879, White enlisted George Lincoln Burr, a former undergraduate assistant for one of his seminars, to manage the rare books collection.

Tolstoy's fascination with Mormonism sparked a similar interest in White, who had previously regarded the Latter-Day Saints (LDS) as a dangerous cult.

Upon his return to the United States, White took advantage of Cornell's proximity to the religion's birthplace in Palmyra to amass a collection of LDS memorabilia (including many original copies of the Book of Mormon); it is unmatched by any other institution outside the church itself and its flagship Brigham Young University.

Her great-grandfathers included General Asa Danforth, an early pioneer of upstate New York and leader of the State Militia, as well as Elijah Philips Sr., who had responded to the alarm to Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1775 and later served as the High Sheriff of Onondaga County.

After his wife died in 1887,[37] White went on a lecture tour and traveled in Europe with his close friend, Daniel Willard Fiske, librarian at Cornell.

She was the first woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D.[38] Like her husband, Helen was a social scientist and educator; the two met at a conference where she was presenting a paper.

[40] White's body resides in a sarcophagus in the Memorial Room with those of other persons deemed influential in the founding and early years of the university, including co-founder Ezra Cornell and benefactor Jennie McGraw-Fiske.

The sarcophagus was completed in 1926 by sculptor Lee Oskar Lawrie (1877–1963), who also created sculptures adorning Myron Taylor Hall at Cornell.

[41] In his will, White left $500,000 ($10.1 million in 2023) to Cornell University, in addition to the considerable sums donated to the institution earlier in his life.

White, author of the world-famous children's book Charlotte's Web, continued to go by the nickname 'Andy' for the rest of his life after his undergraduate years at Cornell.

Historian Benjamin G, Rader argues that in creating Cornell:White championed nondenominationalism, coeducation, an elective curriculum, and academic freedom.

[43] According to professor Geoffrey Blodgett, White confronted a series of complex challenges in his long career:Above all, the creation from scratch of a large, high-quality, coeducational, nonsectarian public university in the cockpit of post-Civil War, educational politics was an organizational chore of awesome subtlety for man of White's genteel background and soaring ideals.