Thomas Clapp Cornell, after whom the newest Yonkers public school is named, came to Yonkers as a young man of 28 in the summer of 1847. At that time, as Cornell himself wrote almost 50 years later, “There was no Warburton Avenue … nor any Dock Street, nor any Hudson River Railroad, nor even any Yonkers as we now know Yonkers. There was but a little rural hamlet of perhaps five hundred people. There were hardly half a dozen streets or crossroads in the whole settlement.”([1])
A civil engineer, Thomas Cornell was employed at the time by the Hudson River Railroad Company and was largely responsible for the construction of the railroad line from Spuyten Duyvil to Dobbs Ferry. The railroad company’s local office -- in which he worked from August 1847 until the completion of his ten miles of track in 1850 - was located in a rented room in the Philipse Manor Hall, which was then a private home owned by Lemuel W. Wells.([2])
Born in Flushing, Long Island, on January 7, 1819, Thomas Cornell had little formal schooling. When Thomas was but a child, the family moved to a farm in the vicinity of Rochester, and it is there that his father Silas is said to have operated a little school during the winter months. According to The Yonkers Herald, this school was “the only school … Thomas ever attended.” The Herald added that the “aggregate” of Thomas’s schooling “did not exceed three years and was ended before he was twelve years old.” Despite the arduous farm work that he took on from an early age, however, the Herald assures us that Thomas “kept up his studies and was often seen spending an hour or two before breakfast, by lamplight studying Latin, Greek or mathematics.”([3])
When Silas Cornell became surveyor of the Rochester area in 1836, Thomas became his assistant. Within four years, by the time he was 21, Thomas was working for New York State on a project to enlarge the Erie Canal. In 1846, after a few years working as an engineer for the Canadian government, Thomas went to Europe. And it was there, in Lyons, France, that this scion of two staunch Quaker families was received into the Catholic Church.([4]) Returning to the States, Thomas took the job with the railroad and shortly afterwards first set eyes on Yonkers. From that day in August of 1847, until December 29, 1894, when he died at the age of 75 in his home on Highland Place, Thomas Cornell would prove to be one of the greatest benefactors Yonkers has ever known.
"The main efforts of his life," the pastor of St. Mary's Church, Rev. Charles R. Corley, said at Thomas Cornell's funeral, "were for his church. He came to Yonkers when it was but a hamlet. He at once put forth efforts so the members of the Catholic faith could get together and have a house in which to worship. Father Preston, the first priest that came to Yonkers, leaned on him for support." ([5])
Thomas Cornell had a hand in the founding of St. Mary's Church in 1848, of St. Joseph's Church in 1871 and of St. Peter's Church in 1894. He donated the land in Riverdale on which the original St. Margaret's Church was built. He was likewise active in the establishment of both St. Mary’s School and St. Joseph's Hospital. He served as a hospital trustee and as the hospital's treasurer.
“The archbishop asked for his assistance," Father Corley noted, "when he wished to establish the Sisters of Charity in Yonkers. It was given and Mr. Cornell has ever been their faithful friend." (During the course of the following century -- as should be well known to everyone in this city -- thousands of Yonkers children were taught by the Sisters of Charity at St. Mary’s, St. Joseph’s and St. Peter’s schools.) Indeed, Cornell accompanied Archbishop John Hughes on a tour of the Edwin Forrest estate -- now the College of Mount Saint Vincent -- when the Sisters of Charity were considering the purchase of the property in the mid-1850s. A full account of the matter, including an amusing episode involving the bishop’s reaction to Forrest’s castle, is given in Cornell's article on The Beginnings of the Roman Catholic Church in Yonkers. ([6])
There are few maps of Yonkers dating from the last half of the 19th Century. But there are probably even fewer which don't bear the name of Thomas Cornell. For, as the Yonkers Statesman pointed out at the time of his death, “He did almost all the surveying and engineering of Yonkers for many years, with occasional work as architect.”[7]
In June 1852, Yonkers got its first newspaper, a four-page weekly called The Yonkers Herald. It was Thomas Cornell who'd convinced reporter Thomas Towndrow to begin publishing a newspaper here. Within a few years, Towndrow's associate Thomas Smith became the editor, and Smith's anti-abolitionist politics were anathema to Cornell (a Republican virtually from the founding of the party in 1856). Thomas Cornell then induced Peekskill's Matthew F. Rowe to relocate to Yonkers and to start a rival newspaper here. Rowe's The Examiner began publication in 1856. [8]
Thomas Cornell was also involved in establishing several Yonkers businesses, including the Yonkers Gas Light Company, the Bank of Yonkers, the Yonkers Savings Bank, and the Yonkers and New York Fire Insurance Company. His genealogical and historical interests led him to take an active role in the Westchester County Historical Society, the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, and the Yonkers Historical and Library Association. Let the last words on this illustrious life be Father Corley’s: "For 17 years he was my friend and I always found him a true man, a good friend and loving husband."[9]
The above article on Thomas Cornell was written at my request by John Favareau, the research librarian for the Yonkers Public Library at Larkin Plaza.