John Harvard

English clergyman and philanthropist (1607–1638)

John Harvard (1607–1638) was an English Puritan minister in colonial New England whose deathbed bequest to the "schoale or colledge" founded two years earlier by the Massachusetts Bay Colony was so gratefully received that the colony consequently ordered "that the Colledge agreed upon formerly to be built at Cambridge shalbee called Harvard Colledge". Harvard was born in Southwark, England, and earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 1637 he emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony – one of the Thirteen Colonies of British America – where he became a teaching elder and assistant preacher of the First Church in Charlestown.

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