VILLARD  .

HENRY (1835–1900), American journalist and financier, was born in Speyer, Rhenish Bavaria, on the loth of April 1835 . His baptismal name was Ferdinand Heinrich Gustav Hilgard . His parents removed to Zweibrucken in 1839, and in 1856 his father, Gustav Leonhard Hilgard (d.1867), became a justice of the Supreme Court of Bavaria, at Munich . Henry was educated at the gymnasium of Zweibriicken, at the French semi-military academy in Phalsbourg in 1849–5o, at the gymnasium of Speyer in 1850-52, and at the universities of Munich and Wiirzburg in 1852–53; and in 1853, having had a disagreement with his father, emigrated—without his parents' knowledge—to the United States . It was at this time that he adopted the name Villard . Making his way 1kestward in 1854, he lived in turn at Cincinnati, Belleville (Illinois), Peoria (Illinois) and Chicago, engaged in various employments, and in 1856 formed a project, which came to nothing, for establishing a colony of " free soil " Germans in Kansas . In 1856–57 he was editor, and for part of the time was proprietor, of the Racine (Wis.) Volksblatt, in which he advocated the election of John C . Fremont (Republican) . Thereafter he was associated (in 1857) with the Staats-Zeitung, Frank Leslie's and the Tribune, of New York, and with the Cincinnati Commercial in 1859-6o; was correspondent of the New York Herald in 1861 and of the New York Tribune (with the Army of the Potomac) in 1862-63, and in 1864 was at the front as the representative of a news agency established by him in that year at Washington . In 1865 he became Washington correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, and in 1866 was the correspondent of that paper in the Prusso-Austrian War . He began to take an interest in railway financiering in 1871, was elected president of the Oregon & California railroad and of the Oregon Steamship Company in 1876, was receiver of the Kansas Pacific railway in 1876-78, organized the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company in 1879, the Oregon Improyemert Company in 188o, and the Oregon & Transcontinental Company in 1881, becoming in that year president of the Northern Pacific rail-way, which was completed under his management, and of which he remained president until 1883 .

In 1887 he again became connected with the Northern Pacific, and in 1889 was chosen chairman of its

finance committee . He was actively identified with the financing of other Western railway projects' until 1893 . In 1881 he acquired the New York Evening Post and the Nation . In 1883 he paid the debt of the state university of Oregon, and gave to the institution $5o,000, and he also gave to the town of Zweibriicken, the home of his boyhood, an orphan asylum (1891) . He died on the 12th of November 1900 . See Memoirs of Henry Villard, Journalist and Financier, i835-xpoo (2 vols., Boston, 1904) .