Edward E. Ayer

Life & Legacy

Edward Everett Ayer (November 16, 1841 – May 3, 1927) was an American business magnate, best remembered for the endowments of his substantial collections of books and original manuscripts from Native American and colonial-era history and ethnology, which were donated to the Newberry Library and Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Ayer had over time built up an immense fortune out of supplying timber to the 19th century's fast-growing railroad industry. However, it was a chance encounter in his youth with a book that inspired Ayer's lifelong investments of time and money that resulted in one of the largest collections of historical and American literature accumulated by the early 20th century. That book was William H. Prescott's famous History of the Conquest of Mexico, which Ayer first read in a small library attached to a silver mine south of Tucson Ayer had been guarding as part of his military service. By his own account, he was indelibly marked by what he read and it became the foundation for his insatiable interest in Indian Americana literature.