William Greenleaf Eliot
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William Greenleaf Eliot (1811 - 1887) was a U.S. educator and Unitarian clergyman. He attended Columbian College, Washington, D. C., and graduated 1831 then attended Harvard Divinity School and graduated in 1834. He then moved to St. Louis and founded the Church of the Messiah, the first Unitarian church west of the Mississippi. While in St. Louis, he was instrumental in the founding of many institutions such as including the St. Louis Public Schools, the St. Louis Art Museum, Mission Free School, South Side Day Nursery and the Western Sanitary Commission to provide medical care and supplies during the Civil War. In 1861 he was part of a small group of men who helped Generals Nathaniel Lyon and Francis P. Blair in preserving Missouri to the Union. He founded Washington University in St. Louis (initially called Eliot Seminary - much to his chagrin) in 1853, and served as its president from 1870 to 1887. He was the grandfather of poet T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965).