[Henry D. Cogswell]

A fascinating collection pertaining to philanthropical deeds and missteps blunders of Henry D. Cogswell, a California pioneer and a dentist by profession, as well as an inventor, a real estate manipulator and investor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, temperance advocate, and egomaniac.

The collection of CDV and cabinet card portraits of Cogswell and his wife Caroline (one a daguerreotype copy); a CDV of a bust of Cogswell; engraved portraits of Cogswell; photographs of his temperance fountains including the fountain in Washington D.C. (often called “The city’s ugliest statue); two original hand-drawn designs for temperance fountains; a photograph of a fountain design; manuscript and typescript outlines for a proposed biography, written by J.H. Culver; manuscript material pertaining to his lawsuit with the trustees of Cogswell Polytechnical College; and a bit of ephemera related to Cogswell Polytechnical college.

Henry D. Cogswell was born in Tolland, Connecticut, in 1820. He fell into poverty as a teenager but pulled himself up by his proverbial bootstraps and by age 26 he was running a successful dental practice. In 1849, he was lured West by the Gold Rush. He briefly tried his hand prospecting but soon realized there was more money in the mouth than the earth, as the mining camps were in great need of skilled oral surgeons. Cogswell moved his practice from a miner’s tent to a San Francisco storefront, shrewdly invested his earnings, and eventually became one of the city’s first millionaires.

Cogswell was determined to use his newfound wealth to uplift the working class. He believed drunkenness to be the defining source of poverty, and that if people had access to cool, refreshing drinking water, they would refrain from consuming alcohol. In 1878, he proposed to design, construct, and donate “temperance fountains” in roughly forty cities across the US, about twenty of which accepted his offer.

The fountains were often installed incorrectly and prone to emitting a high velocity burst of hot water instead of a cool, refreshing stream. Others had to be shut down due to bacterial contamination.

Numerous aesthetic objections were raised. In San Francisco, city officials protested that the fountains were topped with a figure who bore a striking resemblance to Cogswell himself. “When so much was said about the bad taste of placing himself in honorable effigy,” the San Francisco Chronicle later wrote, “the doctor said that all he wanted was a representation of a fine specimen of manhood” and was surprised at the similarities. But few were fooled, as it was widely known Cogswell had posed for the statues. Upon viewing an example in Rochester, NY, Mark Twain declared “It has a putrid, decomposed sort of a look that is offensive for a delicate organism.”

They were the frequent target of vandals. In San Francisco, Cogswell’s bronze-likeness was frequently pelted by stones or dressed up on holidays. One dark night it was torn down after “a crowd of bohemians decided that good taste should be offended no more.” Another statue of Cogswell in Rockville, Connecticut, was thrown into Shenipsic Lake. And another in Dubuque, Iowa, was buried under the ground of a planned sidewalk, never to be seen again.

Besides his ill-fated foray into public works, Cogswell’s other philanthropic-blunder was the founding of Polytechnical College (now called University of Silicon Valley) the first engineering institute west of St. Louis. He originally offered to fund a College of Dentistry at UC Berkeley, but the deal fell through after Cogswell insisted the school be built on an undesirable piece of property he owned. Instead, he built the Cogswell Polytechnical College in San Jose in 1887, but then got into a protracted and acrimonious lawsuit with the trustees in order to reclaim it.

Cogswell passed away in 1900 at the age of 80. He is buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, under a 70-foot monument of his own design.