ITHACA — Thursday, Jan. 11, marked the beginning of a year-long celebration of the life and birthday of Cornell University founder Ezra Cornell.

The university honor Cornell’s 200th birthday with a cake-cutting in Olin Café. Ezra Cornell’s great-grandson, also named Ezra Cornell, a member of the university’s board of trustees, cut the cake and addressed those present. At 12:30 p.m., a chimes concert, led by chimesmaster Gretchen Ryan, featured songs from the 19th century and a special rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

Ezra Cornell was a self-educated individual with a passion for education, said Elaine Engst, Cornell University archivist. “He believed in education,” Engst said. “He believed in education for his own children and he believed in education for everybody. It’s a theme throughout his whole life.”

Cornell was a carpenter, a mechanic, a farmer and a businessman. He was born on Jan. 11, 1807 in Westchester to his mother, Eunice, and his carpenter father, Elijah.

He moved to Ithaca for work in 1828 and married Mary Ann Wood in 1831. The couple had nine children. Cornell assisted with the design of a machine that lay the underground pipe for the emerging telegraph industry in 1843. He made his fortune in the telegraph industry with a company that became Western Union.

He was elected to the New York State Senate in 1864 where he met Andrew Dickson White of Syracuse. Cornell conceived the idea for a university and White introduced a bill in the Senate to create a school in Ithaca via the Morrill Land Grant Act. Other cities in New York fought in the senate to have the school erected in their community, Engst said. A compromise was reached that sent the state’s mental hospital to Willard and the university to Ithaca.

“But there was lots of points in the discussion where the college could have gone somewhere else,” Engst said. “One of the things that happened was that Cornell also agreed to endow this university. “So the funding comes from Cornell’s personal contributions as well as from the federal funding from the Morrill Land Grant Act.”

— (Elmira) Star-Gazette