Born Amasa Leland Stanford in Albany County, New York in 1824, Leland was one of eight children raised on the family farm. He started out as a lawyer in Wisconsin and became active in politics. In 1952, however, California called. It was the time of the Gold Rush and bigger opportunities! Leland joined his brothers running a general store for miners in Placer County (shameless aside: the great-grandmother of the author of this paragraph sat on the lap of Leland Stanford as a young girl living in Placerville, CA in the mid-1800s). Eventually his wife joined him from Wisconsin, they moved to San Francisco and Leland went into the mercantile business on a much grander scale. Along with Crocker, Huntington and Hopkins, Stanford would become one of the “Big Four†investors in the Central Pacific Railroad (Theodore Judah was hired as their chief engineer who figured out how to get that sucker over the steep Sierra Nevadas). The first Transcontinental Railroad would make Stanford millions (equivalent to $1 billion in today’s dollars). Leland Stanford would also be elected to the governorship of the state of California. In 1885, Leland Stanford founded Leland Stanford Junior University as a memorial to his only child, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died as a teenager of typhoid in Italy in 1884 while on a trip to Europe. When Stanford University opened its doors in 1891, its first student was future president Herbert Hoover.
