The buildings that opium built

The name John Cleve Green, widely recognized in Princeton’s past, is today foreign to most students, especially those who don’t take classes or use the library in Green Hall. One of the most generous donors in the University’s history, this philanthropist and foreign trade businessman heavily shaped the college we know today by providing land, funding construction and endowing professorships, University Archivist Daniel Linke explained.

The source of Green’s wealth, however, may seem out of place on Princeton’s roll of donors. Working for international trading companies from a young age, Green profited enormously from the opium trade, according to “The Legacy of John Cleve Green,” a book by William Selden ’34.

Born in 1800, Green began working as a teenager in the counting house of the prosperous and highly regarded international trading firm of N.L. and G. Griswold. During this apprenticeship, he served on lengthy international voyages, buying and shipping tea and silk. In 1833, Russell and Company, America’s largest export house in China, offered him a position.

Green entered the world of the Chinese tea trade at a time when “[b]ribery and smuggling became an accepted means of circumventing the regulations” prohibiting the importation of opium, Selden wrote. The shift to dealing the “noxious drug,” whose importation was forbidden by edict of the Chinese government, occurred when “Spanish dollars and other legal tender proved to be insufficient to compensate the Chinese merchants.”

While the opium trade increased hostility between China and Great Britain and eventually plunged the two countries into war, Green returned to New York a wealthy and influential man, investing in the burgeoning railroad industry and devoting himself to community and civic interests.

Green concentrated the bulk of his civic donations in gifts to the University, in addition to supporting The Lawrenceville School, the Princeton Theological Seminary, the Deaf and Dumb Society and the Home for the Ruptured and Crippled.

Though Green is not a Princeton graduate, his family had close ties to the University. His great-great-grandfather was the Rev. Jonathan Dickinson, Princeton’s first president, and his great-grandfather was the Rev. Caleb Smith, a trustee and the University’s first tutor. Two of his brothers were Princeton graduates, as were an assortment of more distant relatives.

These familial ties may help explain his numerous and substantial donations to the University.

Green “secured for the College in 1866 the land that now forms the northeast corner of the main Campus,” where the University Chapel and Firestone Library sit today, Alexander Leitch ’24 wrote in “A Princeton Companion.”

He contributed to the construction of both Dickinson Hall and Alexander Hall, and in 1871, he provided funds for the University’s first library, Chancellor Green Library, named for his brother, Henry Woodhull Green, Class of 1820 and Chancellor of New Jersey. Having provided for the library’s construction, he then proceeded to create an endowment for the librarian’s salary.

In addition to funding building construction, Green made direct contributions to the University’s academic curriculum, endowing the Joseph Henry professorship in physics and providing funds for the study of Latin, Greek, science and civil engineering.

“The benefactions from his estate continued into the 1890s and included the erection of the College’s first chemical laboratory building at the corner of Nassau Street and Washington Road in 1891,” Leitch wrote.

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Green’s portrait hangs today in the Convocation Room of the E-Quad. As a testament to his generosity, he initially refused to sit for the portrait, believing the University could better spend the money on something more substantive. He consented to the portrait only after being assured that the University was not financing the project.

Most students go to performances in Alexander Hall and study in Firestone without knowing Green’s role in the creation of these buildings. But he has left a legacy that, no matter how curiously funded, continues to touch the University in countless ways.

“And as someone else once said, ‘Princeton is a given place.’ When you’re here, you’re benefiting from three centuries of generosity,” Linke said.