Henry Lee Higginson
Union United States Army officer (1834-1919)
Henry Lee Higginson (November 18, 1834 – November 14, 1919) was an American businessman, financier and philanthropist best known as the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a patron of Harvard University. He also played a central role in the founding of General Electric.
Early life
Higginson was born in New York City on November 18, 1834, the second child of George Higginson and Mary Cabot Lee. George was extremely patriotic, and never owned a house or a horse of his own until within a few years of his death. He was a brother of James J. Higginson and a distant cousin of Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
When Higginson was four, his family moved to Boston. His father jointly founded a brokerage as a junior partner. Henry's mother died of tuberculosis, from which she suffered for some time, when Henry was 15. Henry graduated from Boston Latin School in 1851, only after withdrawing twice due to eye fatigue problems. He began studies at Harvard College, but withdrew after 4 months when he again experienced eye fatigue and he was sent to Europe.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q13533500. VIAF identifies the subject as 60556671. The Library of Congress control number is n86012019. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1834, 1919 and 1851.
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This entry incorporates text from “Henry Lee Higginson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.