Stuart Wyeth
Stuart Wyeth was born on 17 October 1862 in Philadelphia. He was the son of a druggist, John Wyeth. He died on 30 December 1929 of heart disease in Philadelphia.
Wyeth attended Harvard from 1880-1884, earning his AB 1884. He was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club. He then studied law in the office of Judge George M. Dallas of Philadelphia, and continued at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. But never practiced. He joined his family's manufacturing chemical firm, John Wyeth and Brother, Inc. After his father's death in 1907, he became president of the firm.
He never married. Upon his death, he willed $5,000,000 to Harvard without stipulations for its use. Other bequests of the will totaled $220,000, with nearly half going to "a friend," ex-judge James Gay Gordon, whom the newspaper obituary called "an intimate friend...for more than fifty years.".
On May 25, 1931, $500,000 of the Stuart Wyeth Bequest (1930) was assigned by the Harvard Corporation as "a permanent fund of the Astronomical Observatory to be devoted to buildings, equipment and endowment for research in Astronomy." The Wyeth 61-inch reflecting telescope at Oak Ridge Observatory was named after Stuart Wyeth.
