Leonard Case Jr.
Leonard Case Jr. was the most private of Cleveland's great 19th-century donors. He lived alone for most of his adult life in a large Euclid Avenue house, rarely traveled, never married, and published nothing. In 1877, three years before his death, he privately endowed what became the Case School of Applied Science — a gift kept secret until after his death, which in inflation-adjusted terms would be among the larger educational endowments in American history.
The school opened in 1881 on a site adjacent to the new Western Reserve University campus in University Circle. In 1967 the two schools federated, forming what is now Case Western Reserve University. The Case half of the institution retains Case's original mission: engineering, applied science, and technical education.
A Cleveland Inheritance
Leonard Case Jr. was born in Cleveland on June 27, 1820, the son of Leonard Case Sr. — a shrewd land speculator who had arrived in Ohio with the Connecticut Land Company and accumulated one of the largest personal landholdings in the Western Reserve. The elder Case's purchases, made cheaply in the 1810s and 1820s, became enormously valuable as Cleveland grew, leaving his son in possession of a fortune that at its peak was among the largest in Ohio.
The younger Case was tubercular from childhood. He was sent east for schooling and eventually to Yale, where he graduated in 1842 and studied law without ever practicing. He returned to Cleveland and spent the rest of his life managing the family's real-estate holdings from a large stone house at the corner of Rockwell and East 6th Street.
A Scholar's Private Life
Case lived quietly. He was a lifelong Latin and Greek scholar, a gifted amateur mathematician, and a patron of the small scientific and literary community that existed in mid-century Cleveland. He helped organize and fund what became the "Arkites" — a weekly informal discussion group that met at his house through the 1860s and 1870s, including among its regular attendees the historian and diplomat John Hay, the medical pioneer Gustav Weber, and the mathematician John Nash Stockwell.
He never married. Friends described him as shy to the point of reclusion, uninterested in the conventional civic life of Gilded Age Cleveland, and focused instead on scholarship, botany, and the careful management of his inheritance. His older brother, William Case, had served as mayor of Cleveland in the 1850s; Leonard had no such public career.
A Secret Endowment
In 1877, Case privately deeded to a small group of trustees a large tract of his University Circle land and a substantial cash endowment for the founding of a school of applied science. The gift was kept confidential during his lifetime. Case died on January 6, 1880, at age 59, of complications from tuberculosis. The endowment was revealed upon probate of his will.
The Case School of Applied Science opened in 1881 on the land Case had bequeathed, with an initial enrollment of 16 students and a faculty of four. Its purpose, as articulated in Case's bequest, was technical education — engineering, chemistry, physics, mathematics — rather than the classical liberal-arts curriculum of its Western Reserve neighbor.
The two schools coexisted on adjacent campuses in University Circle for 86 years before formally federating in 1967 as Case Western Reserve University. Today's CWRU engineering and physical-sciences programs still operate on the original Case campus; the classical-arts programs continue on Western Reserve's side. Case's bequest remains the founding endowment of the entire university.
Life Timeline
- Born in Cleveland1820
June 27, son of Leonard Case Sr. - Yale Graduation1842
Studies law but never practices. - Manages Family Estate1850
Returns to Cleveland permanently. - Case School Endowed1877
Secret gift of land and endowment. - Dies of Tuberculosis1880
January 6, age 59. - Case School Opens1881
University Circle, adjacent to Western Reserve. - Federation1967
Case and Western Reserve unite as CWRU.