Asa Griggs Candler

All of five feet, three inches tall,

sporting homemade clothing and carrying $1.75 in his pocket, twenty-one-year-old Asa Griggs Candler arrived in Atlanta on July 7, 1873. He had no job awaiting him, having resigned his apprenticeship as a clerk-druggist in Cartersville, Georgia, a week earlier. But he did have family nearby, he had arrived at a young and lusty city on the make, and he had intelligence and ambition enough that he would, within fifty years, augment his pocket change by $50 million.

One of eleven children born in Villa Rica, Georgia, Asa Candler was, all of his life, a devout Methodist. So Asa might have called it Providence, or the hand of God, that led him on his first day in Atlanta to apply for a job at two establishments whose proprietors would, in different ways, help shape his family, fame, and fortune.

The last place of business that Asa called upon, late in the evening of a long day of job-hunting, was the drugstore of George Jefferson Howard. There he found not only a job but also his future wife—Mr. Howard's daughter Lucy "Lizzie" Elizabeth, whom Asa would marry in 1878.

But among the other drugstores Asa visited that day was the Pemberton-Pulliam Drug Company, whose senior partner was "Dr." John S. Pemberton. Doc Pemberton had no need as yet for a young assistant, despite his growing success in the patent-medicine trade. Although many of his concoctions—Extract of Styllinger, for instance, and Indian Queen Hair Dye, and Pemberton's French Wine Coca—did well in the days before regulation by the Food and Drug Administration, it would not be until 1886 that he would mix up in his backyard a new tonic called Coca-Cola Elixir and Syrup.

By 1888, having established his own drugstore and begun to prosper, Asa garnered the wherewithal to purchase from Doc Pemberton and his partners the equipment, the patent, and—most importantly—the "secret formula" for manufacturing Coca-Cola. Thus The Coca-Cola Company was born.

Perhaps it is only coincidence that in that same year, Asa's younger brother Warren became president of Emory College. By the turn of the century, Warren had served as president with great distinction for a decade and then had been elected bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. During the next four decades, owing to his penetrating mind, his devotion to the church, and his charismatic personality, he would become one of the dominant figures of Southern Methodism and a force to be reckoned with in all matters of the church's life.

In 1899 Asa was elected to the Board of Trustees of Emory College. Although Warren had left the presidency the year before, his spirit remained on the campus, and his work regularly permitted him to act in behalf of his alma mater. Together, over the next thirty years, Asa and Warren would do more than any other two persons to move Emory College both literally and metaphorically into a new role in Southern higher education.

As chair of the Finance Committee, Asa brought not only great personal resources to the college's operations but also significant clout in the business world of not-too-distant Atlanta. His first recorded monetary gift to the college—$500 in 1899—helped to establish Emory's first endowed lecture series, named for the Rev. W. F. Quillian of Georgia. That was merely the first driblet of a flood of support that Asa Candler would provide to Emory. Over the next decade and a half, his gifts of more than $160,000 enabled the construction of Haygood Dormitory at Oxford, shored up the College's endowment, and wiped out the 1914 budget deficit of $30,000.

In 1914, following a protracted and vituperative  struggle between the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust and the bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, over control of the university, the Board of Trust won a decision in the Tennessee State Supreme Court. Consequently—even though  the court's decision was couched in terms that would have allowed the church and university to strengthen the weakened bond—the church severed its long relationship with Vanderbilt . Establishing an "Educational Commission" to pursue the denomination's interests more closely, the church planned to create a new university west of the Mississippi River and another one east of it.

Quickly settling on Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, Texas, as the western university, the commission decided to locate the eastern school in either Birmingham, Alabama, or Atlanta, Georgia. Fierce competition between the two cities led the chambers of commerce and prominent citizens of both to lobby the commission intensely. But it was Bishop Warren Candler's brother, Asa, who finally settled the matter with his famous "Million Dollar Letter."

Writing to the Educational Commission on June 17, 1914, the founder of The Coca-Cola Company offered his "impression that what our country needs is not secularized education, but more of the education that is fundamentally and intentionally religious." He voiced his "wish that the characteristic excellences of our people may be made better and that the things which blemish our lives may be speedily obliterated." And to that end he offered "the sum of one million dollars" to establish a university "east of the Mississippi River." Asa went on to say, "I fully appreciate that . . . no amount of money alone is adequate for such a purpose. The faith, the love, the zeal and the prayers of good people must supply the force to do that which money without these cannot accomplish. But I trust all these precious things will be given, together with many other gifts, great and small." Although his letter did not stipulate Atlanta as the location of the new school, the Educational Commission quickly decided the matter, and Asa's further gift of seventy-two acres of land ratified the decision.

At this time those seventy-two acres, known as the "old Guess place," about six miles northeast of downtown Atlanta lay in pasture and heavy pine woods. Asa had bought the property as part of a land development project with his partner, Joel Hurt. Druid Hills they called it—a park-like residential area laid out by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, the designer of New York City's Central Park. It would become the suburb for the wealthy, displacing the older suburb (Atlanta' first), Inman Park, and in time being eclipsed itself by Buckhead.

Within three months of Asa Candler's letter, in September 1914, the first unit of the new university—the School of Theology—began classes in the Wesley Memorial Building that had been constructed by the Southern Methodist Church largely with Candler money in downtown Atlanta. Within a year marble buildings were under construction out in the Druid Hills Campus, and within four years—by September 1919—Emory College had joined the schools of theology, law, medicine, and business at the University's muddy new campus.

The portrait of Asa Candler hanging in the Board Room of the Administration Building bears a small brass plaque identifying him as "Founder of Emory University." Certainly there can be no doubt of his unique influence in shaping the direction of Emory at the beginning of the twentieth century. As chair of the Board of Trustees of Emory College from 1906 until 1915, he knew better than anyone the magnetic power his 1914 gift would have in drawing the college to Atlanta as a new university. And when the University was established and the college trustees voted to entrust the college to the newly formed Board of Trustees of the University, they did so with the assurance that the chair of the University's board was Asa Candler, who continued as chair until his death in 1929.

Asa G. Candler Library

In the interim, Candler gave $1.25 million to build Wesley Memorial Hospital—now Emory University Hospital—on the Druid Hills campus. Its opening in 1922 provided the impetus for the School of Nursing also to move to the campus from downtown Atlanta and would later provide solid reasons for the entire operation of the School of Medicine to be in Druid Hills.

In 1926 Candler also provided the $400,000 to build Asa G. Candler Library, the first library building on the Druid Hills campus. By the time of his death on March 12, 1929, Asa Candler had given some $8 million to Emory—the equivalent, in 1979, of about $34 million. Inspired by his example, his brothers, children, and business partners also gave generously to the University, leaving a virtually incalculable Candler legacy.

Source: Hauk, Gary S., A Legacy of Heart and Mind, Emory Since 1836