Stephen Minot Weld

Stephen Minot Weld, Sr. (1806 – 1867), scion of the Weld Family of Boston, was a schoolmaster, real estate investor and politician. After his death, the Harvard dormitory Weld Hall was raised in his honor.

Weld was the son of prosperous shipmaster and ship owner William Gordon Weld and his well-connected wife Hannah Minot. As an undergraduate, Weld was:

"the most popular member of his class, and this without seeking it, without any concession of principle, by virtue of his sterling worth, his elastic spirits, and his strong social sympathies."

By 1827, Weld opened a school for boys in Roxbury in an area which is now the center of Jamaica Plain. He served as schoolmaster for some thirty years and educated over a thousand students from as far away as Cuba and Mexico. Many of his students went on to Harvard.

Weld had considerable business acumen and made wise real estate investments in present-day Jamaica Plain.

Weld was elected twice to the Massachusetts Governor's Council and was an 1864 presidential elector for the Abraham Lincoln ticket.

During the American Civil War, Weld recruited soldiers for the Union cause. After Appomattox, a battle in which his son Stephen Minot Weld Jr. served with distinction, Weld was instrumental in raising the quarter million dollars that funded the construction of Memorial Hall, a monument to Harvard's war casualties.

Weld spearheaded a 14-year effort that secured passage of the 1865 law authorizing Harvard alumni to elect the members of the Board of Overseers. His reform took control of the institution away from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and helped established Harvard as a truly private college. Weld himself joined the board that year.

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