The Coal Queen Behind Cochran Hall

A woman born into poverty in 1857 in a small coal mining town in southwestern Pennsylvania became known as “the Lady-Elect of Allegheny” and one of its most influential benefactors. Sarah Boyd Cochran (née Moore) and industrialist Andrew Carnegie provided most of the funding that helped President William Crawford transform Allegheny College into a modern institution of higher learning at the turn of the last century. Sarah’s name appears on Cochran Hall, home today to the Patricia Bush Tippie Alumni Center, but that is only one of the physical spaces on campus transformed by her generosity. She also built the College’s first fraternity house, Highland Hall (the site of the Wise Center); the Rustic Bridge and the sandstone wall in the ravine below it; and a two-story gym at Hulings Hall. Sarah also provided funding for the repair of Alden Hall after a 1915 fire and paid to plant 1,000 trees and shrubs throughout campus. This great Allegheny benefactor’s life reads like a fairy tale. One of nine children, she was born to a family of minimal means, but her sharecropper parents saw that she and her siblings received a secondary-level education. She then went to work as a maid for James Cochran, a Pittsburgh-area pioneer in coke production (a byproduct of coal critical to manufacturing steel), and she fell in love with and married his son, Phillip, in 1879. They had a son, James Phillip, a year later. She was supposed to live happily ever after.

Cochran Hall, Allegheny College

At the death of her father-in-law in 1894, the family’s holdings were reportedly worth $2 million (about $60–70 million today). Phillip taught Sarah about the business, referred to her as a partner, and named her vice president of at least one company at a time when women were seen as bad luck for miners and forbidden by state law from working in or around mines. Sadly, Phillip died only five years after his father. He left Sarah one-third of his estate and gave her complete control of their son’s two-thirds until he turned 21. James Phillip died of pneumonia six months short of his 21st birthday leaving Sarah, 44, alone atop a mountain of wealth. These losses were devastating and, like a crucible, forged the woman we know today.

Sarah lay in her grief for a while before she realized that her life still had purpose and that she could do great good with her wealth. With the assistance of a close advisor and acting head of the Cochran businesses, she assumed many of her late husband’s roles and responsibilities, earning the title “Coal Queen.” Sarah used her inherited wealth to change lives and institutions from her hometown to Methodist communities around the globe. She built and supported churches, funded missionary work, and provided a college education for countless young men and women. Some of her most significant philanthropy involved gifts of time and treasure for higher education, and she served as a trustee of Allegheny College (the first female in the role) from 1908 to 1936. Sarah was also a trustee at American University and the former Beaver Female Seminary in Beaver County. She endowed chairs at the latter and Bethany College in West Virginia.

Giving was personal for Sarah. James Phillip was a Phi Kappa Psi fraternity member at the University of Pennsylvania, so Sarah maintained a strong and beloved relationship with the national and local fraternity for the rest of her life. She made her first known gift to Allegheny circa 1903 to build Phi Psi’s Highland Hall house. Sarah’s grand estate, Linden Hall, had a Phi Psi room she kept open for brothers’ visits. West Virginia University’s chapter named its house in her honor and established the Sarah B. Cochran Club for Phi Psi mothers. Sarah was likely comforted by the association with her son and the ongoing relationship with his “brothers.”

Sarah and Allegheny’s President Crawford enjoyed a close and productive relationship until his retirement in 1920. She supported chapel services, created the Sarah B. Cochran Chair for the Presidency in 1910, and provided $100,000 (about $3 million today) of the $500,000 raised in the College’s first major capital campaign in 1912. Her last gift to the College was a bequest of $90,000 at her death in 1936.

President Crawford once said of Sarah: she “has given liberally of her money, but the greatest thing she has given has been herself.” Indeed. She was a woman who knew hardship and great joy; a devoted wife and mother; a prominent business owner and suffragist; a Christian who lived her faith; and a woman with relatively little formal schooling who became a champion of higher education. Sarah used her extraordinary wealth to live again after losing her husband and son and transformed the lives of countless others through education. She was a remarkable person who created a “new light in the world” through her philanthropy. How fortunate we are that it shines upon Allegheny.

LEARN MORE ABOUT SARAH COCHRAN

You may visit her Linden Hall estate: www.lindenhallpa.com

National Women’s History Museum: allegheny.edu/cochran-biography

A Lesser Mortal: The Unexpected Life of Sarah B. Cochran (2021) by Kimberley Hess