address to the Vassar College Board of Trustees. His funeral was held in the Baptist Church on Lafayette Place. Vassar had donated the land and half the cost of erecting the church. He was buried in the Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery. Legacy Springside Springside was the estate of Matthew Vassar, located just off US 9 on Academy Street in Poughkeepsie. It lay across the road from "Woodside", the estate of retired manufacturer G.C. Burnap. Andrew Jackson Downing designed the grounds, and with Calvert Vaux, the main house, which was never built. Springside was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1969 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). Vassar, Michigan Vassar, Michigan, was founded on the Cass River in 1849 by James M. Edmunds. Its main industry was lumbering. Edmunds was a nephew of Matthew Vassar. Edmunds named the settlement after his uncle, who put up the seed money for the project. Vassar College Vassar's niece, Lydia Booth, a teacher who ran the "Cottage Hill Seminary" out of a building Vassar owned on Garden Street, encouraged him to establish a women's college in Poughkeepsie. In January 1861, the New York Legislature passed an act to incorporate Vassar College, one of the first women's colleges in the U.S. On 26 February 1861, at the Hotel Gregory in Poughkeepsie, Matthew Vassar presented the college's Board of Trustees with a tin box containing half of his fortune, $408,000 (approximately $9,700,000 in 2008 dollars) and a deed of conveyance for of land to establish the campus. In 1864, Vassar purchased the art collection of Elias Lyman Magoon, a noted collector of Hudson River School paintings. Vassar's diary entry for June 16, 1865 states, "Sick and tired of College business, no one to help me Except "Scow", Doct Raymond and Swan." In a bill enacted on 15 July 1870, the U.S. Congress waived any tax claim(s) to the donation to the college. USS Matthew Vassar The USS Matthew Vassar was a wooden centerboard schooner. It was purchased by the U.S. Navy in New York in September 1861 and commissioned in January 1862. The ship was assigned to a Mortar Flotilla guarding the approaches to New Orleans. In November 1864, it was assigned to the East Coast Blockading Squadron. After the war the ship was decommissioned and sold at auction. Vassar Home for Aged Men In 1880, Matthew Vassar's nephews, John Guy Vassar and