James Clarke Welling was born in
Trenton, New Jersey on July 14, 1825. He graduated from
Princeton University in 1844. During the
Civil War, he wrote for the
National Intelligencer. Welling was a professor at Princeton when in 1871 he accepted the presidency of Columbian College. He became the
sixth president of the university. He was one of the ten founders of the Cosmos Club in 1878. In 1884, he served as president of the
Philosophical Society of Washington. "The last occasion in which he appeared in public was at the laying of the new cornerstone of the
Corcoran Gallery of Art." Welling died at his summer residence in
Hartford, Connecticut on September 4, 1894. == References ==