John Harvard (1607-1638) was an English clergyman who settled in the American colonies, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1637. Upon his death in 1638, Harvard left half of his estate and personal library to the newly founded college which later became Harvard University. His father, Robert, was a butcher in Southwark; his mother Katharine Rogers came from Stratford-on-Avon. At the comparatively late age of twenty, he was admitted to Emmanuel College, on 19 December 1627. He took his B.A. and M.A. in 1632 and 1635, married in 1636, and in June or July 1637 emigrated to New England, where he ministered in the church at Charlestown. Harvard was only one of a number of Cambridge graduates (well over a third of them were from Emmanuel) who sailed to the new colony on Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s, seeking there a new society and a freer climate for their Puritan views.
Harvard was not the founder of the college, as he is called on the memorial statue there. But on his early death in 1638 he bequeathed to it his library of some four hundred volumes, and half of his estate, which was valued in gross at about £1,700. It sounds little against modern values, but it set the infant college on its feet, and the grateful community decreed that it should forever bear his name. Thomas Shepard summed up what it matters to know of him: 'The man was a Scholler in his life and enlarged toward the country and the good of it in life and death.' Read more.