Church, George Earl (1835-1910)
Role: Explorer and BenefactorDates:
Portrait Location: John Hay Library 300
Artist: Morlock, Ethel ()
Portrait Date: 1885
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 49 1/2 x 29 1/2 in. (125.73 x 74.93 cm.)
Framed Dimensions: 62 1/2 x 42 1/2 in. (158.75 x 107.95 cm.)
Brown Portrait Number: 106
Brown Historical Property Number: 1308
George Earl Church was a writer, a civil engineer, and an explorer in Latin America. Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on December 7, 1835, he moved to Providence at the age of three. His first employment, after having received instruction in engineering during high school and by tutors, was with the Boston & Maine Railroad.
At the age of 22, his first expedition to Latin America took him to Argentina, where he participated in railroad and military advisory projects. When the American Civil War broke out six years later, he returned to the United States and joined the Rhode Island Infantry, earning his military rank as colonel of two regiments.
Church's extraordinary career as an engineer during the period of industrialization, economic expansion and territorial quests spanned from railway projects in Rhode Island and Canada to reporting on the Costa Rican banana industry. He consulted for English investors as well as for the Bolivian government, which commissioned him to explore the prospects of a transnational infrastructure for trading routes to the Atlantic. His expertise in Latin American geography, politics and economy was also sought by the U.S. government for missions in Mexico and Ecuador. He traveled tens of thousands of miles across the Latin American continent on land as well as on the Amazon and the Straits of Magellan.
Church served as vice president of the Royal Geographic Society, and as the first non-British member of the Council of the Royal Geographical Society, among other scientific associations. He published on Mexico and its revolutions in the New York Herald (1866) and on South America's geography in The Geographical Journal (1901).
Church died in London, where he lived during most of the last three decades of his life, on January 4, 1910. Originally, he bequeathed his library on Latin America to Harvard University, with the provision that the materials be kept together in their entity. In 1912, after Harvard proved unwilling to maintain the collection intact, it was transferred to Brown University, which Church had designated as his secondary beneficiary. The George Earl Church Collection, which consists of 3,500 volumes of mostly 18th and 19th century monographs on all topics regarding Latin America, is now housed in Special Collections at the John Hay Library.
Church's portrait was executed in 1885 by British portrait painter Ethel Mortlock (d. 1904), and came to Brown along with the bequest of his library.