Timothy Hopkins
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Timothy Hopkins
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Timothy Hopkins (1860-1936) was a financier and philanthropist. He was born Timothy Nolan in Maine in 1859. When his father died, he was raised by two aunts, and ultimately came to live with Mark Hopkins and his wife in San Francisco. After Hopkins died, his wife adopted Timothy Nolan.
The name of Mark Hopkins (1814 -1878) is known today chiefly because of the posh hotel on Nob Hill in San Francisco that bears his name. His connection with the hotel is tenuous, however, in that he donated the property on which it has been located for the building of a museum. Neither Hopkins nor his estate have had any connection with the property since that time.
An astute businessman, Mark Hopkins looked upon the California Gold Rush in 1849 originally for its mining opportunities, but quickly determined that selling supplies to miners would be more profitable. He and Collis Huntington opened an iron and hardware store in 1854 in Sacramento, where the two began networking with political figures of the day, including Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Theodore Judah. When Judah devised a plan for a transcontinental railroad, Hopkins, Stanford, Crocker, and Huntington formed the Central Pacific Railroad (1861) to build it.
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Hopkins served as treasurer, and oversaw the completion of the railroad linking East and West at Promontory, Utah in 1869. An interesting book on the subject of the “Big Four” is Stephen Ambrose’s “Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built Transcontinental Railroad”, Simon and Shuster, 2000.
From the start, Timothy was treated as a full member of the family of the childless Hopkins. The death of his foster father in 1878 prevented his going to college. Instead, at the age of nineteen he was given important responsibilities in managing the family's financial affairs. In 1879, Mrs. Mark Hopkins formally adopted Timothy.
Mary Kellogg Crittenden of St. Louis, who came to San Francisco in 1875 to live with her mother's sister, Mrs. Mark Hopkins. In 1882, she and Timothy Hopkins were married. Timothy and Mary lived in San Francisco during winters and summered in Menlo Park at their 400-acre estate, located where the Menlo Park Civic Center now stands.
Timothy became a protégé of Senator Leland Stanford, who have been business partners with Mark Hopkins. Hopkins became Treasurer of the Central Pacific Railroad and Director of the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Wells Fargo Bank. He also was on the first Board of Directors of Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma, California, which received over thirty-five thousand remains from Laurel Hill Cemetery in San Francisco after the Board of Supervisors voted in 1900 to remove most of the existing cemeteries from that city.
Stanford urged that Hopkins take an option on 697 acres of land with the purpose of developing it for a town to serve Stanford University. He was on the verge of dropping the option when Senator Stanford personally endorsed a $60,000 note for him and the purchase went through in 1887. He founded the town originally known as University Park. In 1892, the town was renamed Palo Alto.
Timothy Hopkins served as a Stanford University trustee for fifty-one years, donated his private collection of books to the University Library, established the Hopkins Marine station in Pacific Grove (1872), later giving it to Stanford University. He and his wife organized and helped fund the Stanford Home for Convalescent Children. At his death from pneumonia at age seventy-five on January 1, 1936, he was the last survivor from the original University Board of Trustees. He was survived by a daughter, Lydia.
